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

Criticism, Spring, 1995 by John Timberman Newcomb

There is no question that Millay meant the argument of these poems to be an emblem of her arrival at a poetics of public dissent; she reinforced the assertion by re-using the title "Wine from these Grapes" in 1934, to name a whole book of her work.(9) This volume was framed by two allegorical articulations of the nature and meaning of human existence examined through the fragile relationship between humans and the land which Millay had established as part of her political/poetic idiom in "Justice Denied." The first of these, "The Return," is an unsparingly grave meditation on the benevolent indifference of the earth. The wretched, defeated, self-absorbed man who "Has traded in his wife and friend" and who now "has no aim but to forget" was yet another portrayal of those who, as in "Justice Denied" and "Fear," shrank from the responsibilities and challenges of being human. Seeking to objectify the earth as a conventional maternal presence of consolation and forgiveness, this sniveling man found only a place to hibernate, or to lie down and die; all the earth afforded was a bleak "Comfort that does not comprehend." In effect, Millay rejected the conventional femaleness of the earth because the metaphor had too often been used to solace and reinforce the arrogance and self-absorption of patriarchal behavior. The volume ended with the important sonnet sequence Epitaph for the Race of Man, which sketched the history of the earth, including but not limited to the process of human evolution, from before our emergence from the primordial ooze until after our self-annihilation, at which time the unfazed earth would usher in another stage of life. The implicit demand made by these sober formulations was for her readers to stop relying on any outside agency, even the mothering bounty of the earth (which has sufficed for the poet in such earlier works as "Renascence"), to face instead the necessities and responsibilities of humanity.

Within the frame created by these two impressive texts, Millay arranged another cluster of works which extended her efforts to develop an outspoken poetry of progressive political critique. Perhaps the most striking single poem of the volume, "Apostrophe to Man," offered a frankly hortatory address conveying the poet's prescient outrage at the world's accelerating rearmament. Consisting rhetorically of a single twelve-line sentence of almost unbroken imperative statements, the poem combined a muscular rhythmic freshness with a dark wit to build to an ironic punchline, "Homo called Sapiens" By reducing the lofty concept of "Man" to a species which cannot even employ its supposedly distinguishing feature effectively enough to avoid self-slaughter, the poem functioned as a powerful anti-apostrophe to patriarchal complacency and escapism. Next came "Two Sonnets in Memory," addressed to the memory of Sacco and Vanzetti, the first of which identified the two dead men with the human heritage of "Justice" and "beauty," also now dead. While the second sonnet and the poem which followed, "My Spirit Sore From Marching," despairingly drifted away from a forceful political focus towards an abstract "beauty," the poem which ended the group, "Conscientious Objector," snapped back to a pithy engagement with contemporary events. Turning once again to the familiar technique of personifying Death, Millay did not treat it as a vague metaphysical abstraction but instead as a specific and all-too-familiar figure of the 1930's - invading army or secret police with whom the speaker refused to cooperate under any circumstances. The forces of political tyranny initially inspired the speaker to significant, "conscientious" inaction; but notably, in the final lines - "Brother, the password and the plans of our city are safe with me; never through me/ Shall you be overcome" - objector began to merge into fellow resister, much as the poet had found herself drawn more and more actively into social causes.