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- Herausgeber: Carcanet Classics
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Edna St Vincent Millay (1892–1950) was one of the most popular American writers of her generation, and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Thomas Hardy once remarked that America had only two great wonders to show the world: skyscrapers, and the poetry of Edna St Vincent Millay. Poems and Satires restores that wonder to view, while also revealing Millay as a more innovative and versatile talent than she is usually given credit for being. It includes some of her wickedly funny satires (published under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd, out of print since 1924), as well as her acclaimed play Aria da Capo, and reveals her to be not only the defining 'flapper' poet of the 1920s but a crucial voice for the 2020s.The 'fierce and trivial' persona she cultivated in her early lyric poems and sonnets – with their dazzling wit and daring attitudes towards love and sexuality – captured the whirl of bohemian life in New York. In her genre-defying satires, she questioned society's treatment of women and artists in surreal stories and plays, non-fiction and spoof agony aunt letters, and even a Handmaid's Tale-esque dystopia disguised as an almanac from the future.
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Poems & Satires
EDNA ST VINCENT MILLAY
edited by
TRISTRAM FANE SAUNDERS
CONTENTS
POEMS AND SATIRES
10
INTRODUCTION
‘She was too beautiful to live among mortals,’ Richard Eberhart wrote of Edna St Vincent Millay, in his foreword to the 1992 Carcanet edition of her poems. ‘She symbolized Platonic beauty.’
We hear a similar tone from an American art student who, in 1922, spotted the famous ‘Platonic beauty’ in Paris—and was appalled to learn she had an appetite. ‘The girl sitting at the next table was Edna St Vincent Millay,’ this student wrote in her diary. ‘She was eating an enormous plate of sauerkraut and sausages… Such a shock. I had always imagined her so ethereal.’
The art student didn’t exist. She was a creation of the satirist Nancy Boyd, a name well known to readers of Vanity Fair, where that diary-spoof appeared. But Boyd didn’t exist either—she was, in turn, a creation of Millay. Writing under that guise, the poet published a series of short magazine pieces, collected in book form as Distressing Dialogues in 1924 and out of print ever since.
These short satires are riotously funny, and innovative in their range of forms. They move between fiction, drama, letters and a kind of stand-up-comedy-cum-prose-poetry. One is a piece of science fiction: an almanac from a Handmaid’s Tale-esque puritan future, where Prohibition has been extended to not only alcohol but also tea and coffee. Though one or two references to contemporary figures now require footnotes, Millay’s portrait of an American dystopia run by demagogues obsessed with the ‘holy cause of Female Modesty’ has lost none of its bite.
Throughout Distressing Dialogues, Millay rails against pretension, conformity and society’s double standards—with the artifice of ‘ethereal’ femininity often in her crosshairs. Time and again, she returns to two overlapping questions: 12what it means to be a woman, and what it means to be an artist.
‘The Implacable Aphrodite’ takes the form of a short play script. The scene is ‘a studied studio’ where a self-satisfied male suitor visits a female sculptor. One stage direction reads: ‘She is cruelly slicing a lemon, by means of a small dagger with which a Castilian nun has slain three matadors; it strikes him that she looks gentle and domestic.’ At the risk of killing a good gag by dissection: Millay makes the closet drama form itself part of the joke. The reader sees the dagger as it really is; a theatre audience would share the suitor’s ignorant male gaze.
As in those sketches, her experimental anti-war drama Aria da Capo (staged in 1919, published in 1921) sugars its anger with humour. Her harlequins may be calmly eating macaroons but there are dead bodies under the dining table. The best of Millay’s handful of dramatic works, it is a remarkable forerunner to the Theatre of the Absurd, a Pirandellian metadrama in which stock characters are aware of the roles in which they are trapped, one play interrupts another, and death holds the prompt-book.
Considering Millay’s poetry in the context of these satires, we can hear her voice afresh. We can see her not as an idolised beauty, but as a proudly ‘fierce and trivial’ writer of flesh and acid, of sausage and sauerkraut. Millay’s best work is sharp and self-aware, tightly controlled even when dramatising a loss of control, deeply engaged with poetic tradition yet bitingly contemporary.
One line of thought in Millay’s poetry that her satires bring into sharper focus is the battle between body and mind, the ‘treason/ Of my stout blood against my staggering brain’. It is a kind of Cartesian dualism: for this independent-minded poet, a human body is a strange and silly thing to have. Millay-as-Boyd writes: ‘I am tired of feet. Feet are unpleasant. They are too flat. And there are too many toes on them.’ In ‘Menses’, 13quite possibly the first poem explicitly about menstruation published in America, a version of the poet cries out: ‘Heaven consign and damn/ To tedious Hell this body with its muddy feet in my mind!’ A late poem calls the heart ‘an idling engine, shaking the whole machine’; it is at once the seat of emotion and a mechanism of ‘diastole and systole’, unreliable in both roles.
As for sex? An enjoyable way to satisfy an appetite, but to any sensible individual no more shocking than a plate of sausages. Millay’s unfinished satirical novel Hardigut, which she described as an allegory for attitudes to sex, imagined a world where ‘people, otherwise perfectly sane and normal, do not eat in public, or discuss food except in innuendos and with ribald laughter.’ In a Boyd piece, the Walrus from Alice in Wonderland suggests that instead of going on about sex—a tiresome cliché—to liven up conversation people could instead talk about indigestion. One sonnet questions the procreative urge through a pair of dispassionately rutting dinosaurs; another ends with the killer couplet, ‘Whether or not we find what we are seeking/ Is idle, biologically speaking.’
And yet, sex has a way of getting tangled up with love. Without longing and heartbreak, and all their associated pains, great poems would never be written. One of Millay’s finest sonnets compares her body of work to a tower built ‘From what I had to build with; honest bone/ Is there, and anguish; pride; and burning thought;/ And lust is there, and nights not spent alone.’
It is this Millay, rather than the ‘Platonic’ ideal, that holds the public imagination. In 2018, the Guardian lamented that ‘Millay’s work has been overshadowed by her reputation’ as ‘a party girl poet’ and ‘a sexually adventurous bisexual’, claiming that ‘over the last half century’ this image has ‘eclipsed’ the poetry. That account of Millay’s reception is a little misleading, for three reasons.14
First, popular interest in her reputation is not a development of the last half century. Millay’s image overshadowed her work almost from the outset. In 1936 her first biographer, Elizabeth Atkins, presented Millay as ‘the unrivalled embodiment of sex appeal, the It-girl of the hour, the Miss America of 1920’.
Second, Millay’s image is not a blot on her work but an element of her work. It was a carefully constructed artistic achievement, developed through her writing and cemented in her charismatic public performances—honed through her experience as an actor and dramatist—on reading tours where she addressed audiences of thousands. ‘Millay’ was just as much an authorial creation as Nancy Boyd. Millay used the reader’s assumed knowledge of her public image as a poetic device. One sonnet begins:
That love at length should find me out and bring
This fierce and trivial brow unto the dust,
Is, after all, I must confess, but just;
There is a subtle beauty in this thing,
A wry perfection
The Millay persona is key to the poem’s central irony; that love should capture this particular poet, a poet who has so often shown herself to be too cool to fall in love, a poet who, after being felled by a force so patently beneath her, is still able to take a step back and observe the droll poetic justice of it.
Another wickedly ironic sonnet, ‘I, being born a woman and distressed’, illustrates the thesis of the critics Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Gubar. They consider both Millay and Marianne Moore as ‘female female impersonators’ who ‘attired themselves in the artifice of the feminine so that they could produce ironic but vitally biographical portraits of the artist as that supreme fiction, woman.’ It’s a quality also apparent in her sardonic self-portrait ‘E St V M’, unpublished in her lifetime.15
It is this that makes Millay as much a poet of the 2020s as the 1920s. The sonnets quoted above are of a piece with, say, the persona of Phoebe Stuckes’s Platinum Blonde, or Hera Lindsay Bird’s love poems, where glib irony is weaponised as ‘a Trojan horse for sincerity’.
This particular Millay was, however, just one side to a persona that took on several aspects over the years—from the vatic, Romantic singer of early life-and-death poems such as ‘Renascence’ and ‘The Blue-Flag in the Bog’, to her final act as America’s unofficial poet laureate in her campaigning work of the 1940s.
The third reason why it is wrong to complain that ‘Millay’s work has been overshadowed by her reputation’ is that today her reputation casts no shadow. Most younger readers in 2021, encountering a few of her poems in anthologies, will naturally be unfamiliar with the narrative of her life. They will have no suspicion that she was once considered (as John Wilkinson put it in 2003) ‘the most glamorous, sexually-dangerous and famous poet since Byron’.
Vincent—as Millay was called by friends and family—found success early and in an unusual way: she might be the only author to have risen to prominence by losing a competition. Born in 1892, she grew up in coastal Maine, living from 1904—the year of her parents’ divorce—in a rundown neighbourhood of Camden beside the Megunticook River. When it burst its banks in winter, the poet and her two younger sisters would skate on the frozen floor of their flooded kitchen.
Her father left the family when she was young, and her mother was kept away for weeks at a time by her work as a nurse. As the oldest daughter, Millay was unwillingly thrust into the role of homemaker, a position from which she could see no escape. But in 1912, aged 20, she entered her poem ‘Renascence’ in a contest that offered cash awards for three 16winners, and a place in an anthology called The Lyric Year for a longlist of 100. It changed the course of her life.
‘Renascence’ didn’t win, but it made the longlist. When The Lyric Year appeared, the poem’s snubbing became a cause célèbre. The judges were widely criticised for choosing the wrong winners: The New York Times and Chicago Evening Post both called ‘Renascence’ the best thing in the book. A supernatural vision in tight tetrametric couplets, it prefigures a preoccupation with death that haunts all Millay’s work—not as something to be feared in itself, but as a cruel negation of the vibrancy of life.
Incidentally, an early hint of Millay the satirist can be seen in a letter she sent the poet Arthur Davison Ficke, who had written to The Lyric Year’s editor about ‘Renascence’. Ficke had called it ‘a real vision, such as Coleridge might have seen,’ adding: ‘Are you at liberty to name the author? The little item about her in the back of the book is a marvel of humor. No sweet young thing of twenty ever ended a poem precisely where this one ends: it takes a brawny male of forty-five to do that.’
The letter was passed on to Millay, who replied: ‘I simply will not be a “brawny male.” Not that I have an aversion to brawny males; au contraire, au contraire… Is it that you consider brain and brawn so inseparable?—I have thought otherwise. Still, that is a matter of personal opinion. But, gentlemen: when a woman insists that she is twenty, you must not, must not call her forty-five. That is more than wicked; it is indiscreet.’
That summer, Millay recited ‘Renascence’ at a masquerade party held by the staff of a hotel where her sister Norma worked as a waitress. One guest within earshot was Caroline Dow, dean of the New York YWCA. Dazzled, Dow promised that very night to take up a collection among her wealthy friends, in order to send the poor prodigy to college.17
She was true to her word. Millay was admitted to Vassar, despite flunking two of three entrance exams. There, the college president turned a blind eye to her constant misbehavior. He later recalled:
[I] told her, ‘I want you to know that you couldn’t break any rule that would make me vote for your expulsion. I don’t want to have any dead Shelleys on my doorstep and I don’t care what you do.’ She went to the window and looked out and she said, ‘Well on those terms I think I can continue to live in this hellhole.’
When Millay nonetheless managed to get herself suspended—after sneaking out for a night at the opera—more than 100 of her classmates signed a petition calling (successfully) for her to be let off.
After graduating in 1917, she moved to Greenwich Village. Her first collection was published that year, and her poems were appearing widely in magazines. In March 1918 she wrote to the editor of Poetry:
Dear Harriet Monroe,—
Spring is here,—and I could be very happy, except that I am broke. Would you mind paying me now instead of on publication for those so stunning verses of mine which you have? I am become very, very thin, and have taken to smoking Virginia tobacco.
Wistfully yours,
Edna St Vincent Millay.
PS I am awfully broke. Would you mind paying me a lot?
Monroe became one of her early champions, calling Millay ‘perhaps the greatest woman poet since Sappho’ in a 1924 essay noting ‘how neatly she upsets the carefully built walls of convention which men have set up around their Ideal Woman’.18
Monroe wrote of Aria Da Capo—staged in December 1919—that it was ‘a masterpiece of irony sharp as Toledo steel’. But it was a fast-selling book of lighter verse, A Few Figs from Thistles, first published in 1920 by a Greenwich Village bookseller, which made her a household name—and a figurehead for a liberated, fast-living younger generation. To the Bohemians and flappers of 1920s New York, its opening poem was a manifesto:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
In October 1920, she wrote: ‘I am becoming famous […] The current Vanity Fair has a whole page of my poems, and a photograph of me that looks about as much like me as it does like Arnold Bennett.’ She was well known enough for the New York Tribune to run a contest asking for parodies ending with her name (eg: ‘Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;/ But love grows bitter with treason and Edna St Vincent Millay’).
In 1923 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (the judges chose her work over that of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens), and married a Dutch businessman, Eugen Boissevain. He was the widower of Inez Milholland, the famous feminist campaigner and war correspondent whom Millay had met at Vassar, and later elegised in a sonnet.
The extent of her early popularity and acclaim is difficult to exaggerate. Thomas Hardy was said to have remarked that America could boast only two great achievements: the skyscraper and the poetry of Edna St Vincent Millay.
On a reading tour in 1928, Millay met and fell in love with a 22-year-old poet called George Dillon. Their affair inspired 19her bestselling sonnet sequence Fatal Interview, and they later collaborated on a translation of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal.
Though her critical reputation waned in the 1930s, her 1939 collection Huntsman, What Quarry? contains some of her boldest and most incisive poetry—clear-eyed and unsentimental, and all the more moving for it. It also showed her willingness to experiment with flexible forms. ‘Rendezvous’, a rhymed poem of 14 lines describing an encounter with a younger man, is a kind of sagging sonnet. The elastic lines of its final quatrain test how long a rhyme can linger in the memory:
Yet here I am, having told you of my quarrel with the taxi-driver over a line of Milton, and you laugh; and you are you, none other.
Your laughter pelts my skin with small delicious blows.
But I am perverse: I wish you had not scrubbed—with pumice, I suppose—
The tobacco stains from your beautiful fingers. And I wish I did not feel like your mother.
After Huntsman, What Quarry?, Millay shifted the focus of her writing. Horrified by Nazi Germany, she became a propagandist, urging America to join the war and later supporting its wartime efforts. She was, by her own admission, writing ‘not poems [but] posters’. There Are No Islands Any More, distributed as a broadside by the British War Relief society in 1939, is written in rhyming couplets beginning ‘Dear isolationist, you are,/ So very, very insular!’ It is far from her best work. Millay knew this. ‘I have one thing to give in the service of my country—my reputation as a poet,’ she wrote. ‘If I can write just one poem that will turn the minds of a few to a more decent outlook […] what does it matter if I compose a bad line or lose my reputation as a craftsman?’20
In 1942, when a poll suggested 30 per cent of Americans were willing to accept peace with Germany, her radio drama about the massacre of a Czech village, The Murder of Lidice, was broadcast to millions across the United States. What role her 1940s writing had in swaying the tide of national opinion cannot be estimated, but, as she predicted, she lost her reputation for craftsmanship. As the critic Merle Rubin put it, ‘She seems to have caught more flak from the literary critics for supporting democracy than Ezra Pound did for championing fascism.’ Millay exhausted herself working for the War Writers’ Board and quit in 1943 following a nervous breakdown.
By the late 1940s Millay was drinking heavily and addicted to the morphine that she began taking in 1936, following a car-crash that left her with painful nerve damage in her spine for the rest of her life. The death of her husband in 1949 affected her deeply. On October 19 1950, she was found dead at their home in upstate New York, having fallen down a flight of stairs in the night.
Millay’s reputation has fluctuated since her death. She was acknowledged as an influence by Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, but both were ambivalent about her work: it came to be seen as unfashionably sentimental, personal, un-modern. She was omitted entirely from the 1976 Oxford Book of American Poetry. But the work of feminist critics such as Gilbert and Gubar ushered in a re-evaluation around the time of her centenary, in which Carcanet’s 1992 Selected Poems, edited by Colin Falck, played an important role.
It was through that pioneering edition that I fell in love with Millay’s work. Falck, who passed away last year, celebrated Millay’s ‘existential fierceness’, with a particular focus on those poems which showed her ‘essential modernity’, especially her late free verse. This was a necessary corrective to editions before and since which have erased Millay’s later work entirely. For 21example, Penguin Random House’s Modern Library Selected, marketed as ‘a definitive collection’, includes nothing later than The Harp-Weaver, and Other Poems (1923).
The title poem of that collection is one of Millay’s least modern-seeming, but also one of her most popular. It has been taught in schools, recited on television and set to music by Johnny Cash. For one critic writing in the Iowa Review in 1992, the automatic answer to the question ‘Who is Edna St Vincent Millay, anyway?’ is ‘She wrote “The Harp Weaver.”’ By omitting the poem, the previous Carcanet selection made a clear statement: this was not the Millay readers thought they knew.
In this new selection, I have tried to seek a middle path, striking a balance between including work which brought Millay acclaim in her lifetime, pieces which suggest her range as an artist, and those poems which best show the interplay between her roles as poet and satirist. I have also regularised a few small inconsistencies of punctuation and spelling, such as ‘colour’ for ‘color’; Millay used both spellings interchangeably.
