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

Criticism, Spring, 1995 by John Timberman Newcomb

Unlike these commentators, I would argue that "Justice Denied," like Millay's involvement in the Sacco-Vanzetti protests itself, was the catalyst in her reconstruction of her poetic persona into something more socially forceful. More than any other text, "Justice Denied" was central to the dissident poetics which Millay developed over the next decade, offering her access to a subject matter of broader social scope, and to a vocabulary of images upon which she could draw to express her outrage at injustice and complacency. The first descent of the poem in Millay's work emerged about two months after the executions, when her most significant prose essay, "Fear," appeared in The Outlook.(7) "Fear" was a withering retrospective rebuke to those who, as in "Justice Denied," had shrunk before the painful struggle against injustice. It began, "There are two names you would not have me mention, for you are sick of the sound of them (293), and drew again upon the central rhetorical gambit of "Justice Denied" in creating the wheedling, self-pitying voice of those who succumbed to fear and condoned the executions: "Do let us forget, you say; after all, what does it matter?" (293). Millay scornfully criticized those Americans who, while wrapping themselves in the noble concepts which supposedly govern the nation, were actually ruled by fear: "You do not know exactly what [honor and glory] are. For you do not live with them. They are not trees to shade you, water to quench your thirst. They are golden coins, hidden under the mattress in a very soiled wallet. The only pleasure they afford you is the rapturous dread lest some one may be taking them away" (294-95). Millay argued that indeed, "some one is taking them away. But not the one you think" (295). It was not anarchists, of course, but the paranoia and hypocrisy governing the parental generation which were turning their children into the very skeptics and unbelievers the parents feared. That Millay was willing to risk alienating a significant segment of her readership by putting her outrage into direct, unadorned prose speaks to its depth and sincerity. The effective transference of the thematic material of "Justice Denied" into the different context of "Fear" also indicates that unlike some of the critics who disparaged her willingness to abandon poetry for political polemic, Millay saw no contradiction, no barrier, between the two discourses. Not only were they not mutually exclusive, but they could draw upon the same organizing patterns of imagery, tone, and methods of address.

The development of Millay's new poetics, which we might call a dissident romanticism, was consolidated in the group of poems springing from the Sacco-Vanzetti experience, which she arranged together in her volume The Buck in the Snow (1928).(8) The unavoidably political thrust of "Justice Denied in Massachusetts" lent the allegorical poems which surrounded it a level of political meaning which in other contexts it might have been possible to overlook. Collectively "The Anguish," "Justice Denied," "Hangman's Oak," "Wine From these Grapes," and "To Those Without Pity" formed a striking announcement to the poet's critics and readers that her previous poetic personal was insufficient to the task of facing ethnic bigotry and legalized political murder, and that she intended to follow permanently the stringent agenda of dissent she had expressed in "Fear."