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The woman as political poet: Edna St. Vincent Millay and the mid-century canon
Criticism, Spring, 1995 by John Timberman Newcomb
For most of this century Edna St. Vincent Millay was among the most widely-known and read of all American literary figures. Yet at the peak of her popular reputation there began an intensive effort in certain critical circles to marginalize Millay's poetry, which by the time of her death in 1950 had succeeded in destroying much of her critical reputation. The widening disjunction between popular and critical evaluations of Millay mirrored a broader evaluative shift in the critical canons of modernist poetry during the mid-century period: away from communicative immediacy and social commentary, towards such qualifies as complexity, originality, and impersonality, and best exemplified by such poets as Eliot, Pound, and Yeats. Devastated by this canonical shift were the critical reputations of two groups of well-known writers: on the one hand, explicitly populist poets such as Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Archibald MacLeish, and Stephen Vincent Benet; and on the other, female lyricists such as Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, Grace Hazard Conkling, and numerous others. Millay is one of the few poets in both of these categories.(1) In recent years feminist historians and critics of modernism have begun to reclaim Millay as a central figure in establishing and expanding the place of the female voice in American poetry; I hope to add a dimension to their portrayal of Millay by arguing that it was her forceful coupling of a poetics of progressive political dissidence with her longstanding feminism that made her especially threatening to the reactionary forces of mid-century criticism, whose efforts will remain in force until we can include in the critical reevaluation of Millay a serious, sympathetic consideration of her explicitly political poetry. In this two-part essay I will first trace the politicization of Millay's public persona and poetry, and will then offer an analytical sketch of the critical forces which have long obscured the potential value of her more explicitly political work in the academic canons of American poetry.
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Millay was particularly well-positioned to have an impact on the politics of twentieth-century poetry because she was seen by many as a prototype of the "modern woman," especially in her assertion of the right to and need for female self-determination of body, mind, pocketbook, and voice. Virtually from the beginning of her career, critical discussion of Millay, favorable and unfavorable alike, had tended to treat her not merely as an individual writer but as an exemplary instance of "the woman as poet," as John Crowe Ransom put it.(2) Thus her turn in the late 1920's towards poetry as an expression and potentially a form of political commitment was not merely an individual choice, but implied the potential for a broader scope for female poets at large.
The immediate external catalyst of Millay's politicization, of course, was the Sacco-Vanzetti case.(3) In 1927, along with a number of other writers, she was arrested in the protests against the impending executions; unlike them, Millay commanded a renown which enabled her to arrange a meeting on the day before the executions with the Massachusetts governor, who apparently felt forced to sit and listen to her impassioned hour-long appeal. There is little question that the profound disillusionment she experienced from the failure to save Sacco and Vanzetti triggered a fundamental and permanent shift in the tone of her poetry, in which an aesthetic of "mature" bitterness superseded one of "immature" beauty. Millay came to see one of the central social functions of poetry as that of protest and resistance against the powerful forces of xenophobic paranoia and intolerance which appeared to control the American social establishment and system of justice. She was never able to muster much confidence in any specific political or social program; in this she shared an alienation from practical politics with most of the other bourgeois modernist poets of her generation. Unlike many of them, Millay refused to accept that alienation as a mandate to universalize or ignore the political. Instead she used her disillusionment to produce forceful, explicit expressions of protest against and critique of social injustice.
The first expression of her nascent agenda of progressive dissent emerged strikingly on August 22, 1927, the day before the executions, with the publication of her poem "Justice Denied in Massachusetts" in the New York Times.(4) Here again Millay was able to use her prominence to open doors which would have been closed to less well-known poets. In this context, surrounded by reports of the worldwide protests and the preparations for the executions, "Justice Denied" functioned quite literally as news, as its title, modelled on a screaming newspaper headline, acknowledged. Indeed, the poem forcefully exploited the striking contrast between its title and its traditional conceptual structure of the allegorical landscape. The latter demanded that readers recognize that this was not just political sloganeering but was in fact a poem by a famous and revered poet, while the former refused to abstract or universalize the political dimension of existence to a comfortable distance, as poems so often tend to do. Millay's allegory mounted a critique of the forces of "quack and weed" which had choked the land's rich inheritance of social justice, leaving "a blighted earth to till/ with a broken hoe." The detail of her allegorical arrangement implicitly presented Millay's vision of an ideal democracy and the current despoliation of American political freedoms: the land itself was sweet, bountiful and meant to be shared in common; the evil came from choking weeds, cancerous growths which interrupted the beneficent domestic processes of growing corn and larkspur. That not merely the ground but the present instruments of tending - hoes and hayrack - had been despoiled by increasingly impervious "stalks," suggested the urgent need for new and stronger methods of contemporary social reform.
