Speak the speech … trippingly: an anthology features poets reading their own work, with early recordings by Tennyson and Browning and masterful turns by T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop and Langston Hughes

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 11, 2002 | by Rex Roberts, | Martin Robin

Most people remember Millay for these lines entitled "First Fig":

   "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!"

But there is far more to Millay as a poet. She could write, it seems, poem upon poem about love, and always make each sound as fresh as the one from which Milford has taken her title:

   "I had forgotten how the frogs must
   sound
   After a year of silence, else I think
   I should not so have ventured forth
   alone
   At dusk upon this unfrequented road.
   I am waylaid by Beauty. Who will walk
   Between me and the crying of the
   frogs?
   Oh, savage Beauty, suffer me to pass,
   That am a timid woman, on her way
   From one house to another!"

In the final analysis, it's the plangent tone of Millay that gives her poetry its special, distinctive quality. Like D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, the artistry of her poetry reposes comfortably in the clear, well-crafted declarative sentence. There is a confidence about her poetic voice that is persuasive to the reader, and it must have taken a lot of modernist ideology to make people turn a deaf ear to the value of her poetry. Happily, this biography will introduce a new generation of readers to a poet too little read in the last half-century.

MARTIN ROBIN IS A WRITER LIVING IN PASADENA, CALIF.

REX ROBERTS IS THE NEW YORK CORRESPONDENT FOR Insight.