The woman as political poet: Edna St. Vincent Millay and the mid-century canon

Criticism, Spring, 1995 by John Timberman Newcomb

Ultimately, for Ransom, the extent of Millay's achievement was to have created "a distinguished objective record of a natural woman's mind" (104). His refusal even to acknowledge, much less to read sympathetically, any of Millay's explicitly political works was particularly outrageous, since in them she had done exactly what Ransom had said the female poet was uninterested in and incapable of doing: effectively working with subject matter not limited to the "personal," or to "innocent external nature." It was Ransom himself, and not Millay, who had enforced this prohibition.

Through an essay on Millay published twelve years after The World's Body, at the height of the postwar literary reaction against politics, we can view the results of the contest in which Ransom was actively engaged. John Ciardi's obituary consideration of Millay - subtitled "A Figure of Passionate Living" - operated within a canonical frame of reference completely dominated by New Critical values; the writers mentioned in his opening paragraph read as a New-Critical Who's Who, the first six being Pound, Eliot, Baudelaire, Yeats, Hopkins, and Joyce.(18) In this context Ciardi treated Millay's career and value in an even more demeaning fashion than had Ransom: as part of an immature stage of American modernist culture filtered through the critic's own intellectual and physical adolescence. While for Ransom Millay was "the woman as poet," for Ciardi she was equally quintessential, having "invented a decade" (9), the gay 20's. Thus Millay's primary role was not as a creator of poetic texts but as an exemplary persona, a fantasy female who embodied the exciting, liberating passions of youth: "It was not as a craftsman nor as an influence, but as the creator of her own legend that she was most alive for us" (77).

Despite his lip service to its achievements, Ciardi ultimately ridiculed Millay's decade, which was typified by such things as "a great deal of high-level small-talk by flat-chested girls in excruciating dresses," and which had left behind "stacks of unread little magazines" (8) (as if every decade of this century had not). In this world Millay was a "name for the kind of lyric to be imitated wherever the female heart beat fast" (8). Ciardi thus poured contempt upon those gullible, sentimental female readers excited by Millay's work; but as his essay makes clear, Millay was eminently capable of quickening the male heart as well. Her importance in Ciardi's adolescent modernism was quite literally as the object of the pubescent critic's desire. He described himself as "a happy prowler in the dark stacks" of his public library, who, having discovered in her works "grief, pride, curses, [and] whores," "began to read Millay avidly, to spout her endlessly" (9). "[W]hat an excitement it was then to curl up with [her work] in a corner of the stacks," anticipating the time "when you could recite it to a girl with the moon beside you, or, perhaps more accurately, to the moon with a girl beside you. Certainly the moon comes first" (97). Note Ciardi's discomfort, like Ransom's, with the sexual connotations of his system of figures. He could not bear to leave anyone with the impression that he used poetry as a direct sexual lure with his adolescent dating partners; therefore he had to show that, as a good mid-century New Critic, he understood that the symbol (the moon) was always richer, more meaningful, and somehow even more morally acceptable, than the actual girl. He thus managed to diminish not only Millay but his girlfriends as well, all of whom became mere props for the growth of his own imaginative capacity.