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

Criticism, Spring, 1995 by John Timberman Newcomb

Clearly, however, there were those who wished to dispute Atkins's estimate, which was itself obviously an attempt at canon-making. The attacks on Millay's work during the next two decades, even when couched in aesthetic terms, were therefore not just evaluations of a particular poet, but ideologically inflected sorties in a campaign to seize control of and homogenize the definitions and canons of "modern poetry" in two interdependent ways: by calling into question the ability of the female consciousness to deal with weighty, transpersonal subject matter; and by dismissing the propriety of seeing poetry as a form of political action. In sketching the critical marginalization of Millay I will focus on two representative attacks by influential poet-critics published at crucial junctures of the mid-century period. Though neither essay concentrated on Millay's explicitly political work, which is in itself revelatory, the structures of value they advanced were highly symptomatic of mid-century criticism's tendency to characterize major poetry as an activity which was both properly the province of males and which properly transcended politics.

As my references above to Tate and Brooks have suggested, the major figures of New Criticism largely concurred in their uneasiness at the idea that Millay was the exemplary modem poet. But while the remarks of these others, made in more casual or passing contexts, did grant Millay a measure of real distinction, John Crowe Ransom's essay on Millay, "The Woman as Poet," published in 1937 and reprinted the next year in one of the seminal texts of New Criticism, The World's Body, attempted a full-scale demolition of the notion of Millay's majority.(14) Employing wholesale gender stereotyping in order to valorize a poetry of intellectual rigor and complexity which was strongly male in emphasis, "The Woman as Poet" has for good reason become a rather notorious example of anti-female criticism, referred to by Alicia Ostriker, William Drake, and Cary Nelson in their recent studies of modernist poetry, although a full-scale critique of the sexist assumptions and stereotypes employed by Ransom has still to be done.(15) Here I will treat the essay primarily as an instance of reactionary canonical combat directed against the politically progressive - and female - aspects of modernist poetry represented by Millay.

It is worth noting the date of Ransom's essay, at the very beginnings of Agrarian-New Critical influence in American criticism. Prominent in the literary culture of 1937 was the "Popular Front" policy of accommodation between all left-of-center positions, which meant that the right-wing element of high modernism was to some extent on the defensive, by no means the hegemonic shaper of literary canons that it would be a dozen years later. Eliot and Pound were widely admired and influential, but then so was Millay. Ransom was thus engaged in an active canonical contest whose outcome was in much doubt. Under these circumstances, one strategy for devaluing Millay's engagement was to ignore it, by paying no attention to any of her explicitly political poetry. But what Ransom did reveal - his preconceptions of the limitations of female poets, and the ideals of poetic achievement he held up in contrast to Millay's - nonetheless constituted a prohibition against exactly the sort of social engagement that Millay was striving to establish for the modern female poet.