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

Criticism, Spring, 1995 by John Timberman Newcomb

The scope of Ransom's decanonizing project was evident from its dual target, in that "The Woman as Poet" was conceived not only as an evaluation of Millay's work but as a review of Elizabeth Atkins's 1936 critical biography Edna St. Vincent Millay and Her Times. In other words, Ransom was scrutinizing the place of the woman as critic as well, remarking in his first paragraph that "To read [the biography] is to have a mounting inclination to try a little dialectic upon the poet's poetry and the critic's criticism" (76). Here Ransom portrayed himself as a sort of experimental scientist in a position to "try" various methods of analysis (including the wonder-drug "dialectic") "upon" the objects of analysis - poet and critic - both female. The possibility (or threat) of having female critics as competitors and peers helping to shape literary canons should not be underestimated as a factor forming Ransom's evaluation. Much of the essay's discussion is indeed devoted to Atkins's critical shortcomings. Ransom admitted being perhaps too harsh with Millay's work because he had been "teased by Miss Atkins's foolish admiration, and even . . . by a vague sense that too much of that sort of thing has been going on" (102103). If for Ransom Millay was the quintessential female poet, then Atkins's writing on Millay was equally representative of "that sort of thing": "a woman critic, satisfied with the effects of a woman poet, [who] almost ignores or almost resents the intellectual effects of other poets" (79-80). This twinned portrayal of Millay and Atkins as equally exemplary of the nonintellectual female consciousness meant that when Ransom attacked the critic, it reinforced his attack on the poet, and vice versa.

The supposedly nonintellectual criticism of Atkins was itself a strategic characterization of Ransom's which needs closer examination. Though it was easy for Ransom to characterize it as silly by quoting one or two of its many undeniably florid passages, Atkins's book is actually a quite wide-ranging and authoritative work which was not written primarily for a popular audience, and which carried the imprimatur of the University of Chicago Press. Atkins's championing of Millay was placed in the context of a broader account of modern poetry which had little time for what she called the "nihilism" of Eliot and the obscurantism of such other canonical figures of high modernism as Hopkins and Pound.(16) Though Ransom would have us believe otherwise by trivializing the critic's project as just more of "that sort of thing," Atkins was by no means just an irritatingly simple-minded celebrator of Millay, but was a threateningly learned critic attempting through interpretive, historical, and rhetorical means to demolish the high-modernist value structure Ransom had wholeheartedly adopted as his own.

In the body of his essay Ransom engaged in an ideologically potent counter-attack against those such as Atkins who resisted the elitist canons and values of high modernism. Eliot was only one of the high-modernist sacred cows Ransom defended by attacking Atkins's critical judgment and Millay's poetic achievement. Most notably, Ransom vehemently contested Atkins's attempt to appropriate the rising canonical status of John Donne. Ransom characterized the modernist recovery of Donne as "the way to identify [the] literary taste" of the age (78); but for Ransom Donne was exclusively and always "the poet of intellectualized persons" (78). By definition, then, the true taste of the age was an intellectual one, and it was nonsense to juxtapose Donne and Millay, as Atkins did, since Millay was "rarely and barely very intellectual, and I think everybody knows it" (78). The lesson Donne had taught modernists was the value of such qualities as "strength," "directness," "realism," and "unprettiness" (81). Donne and a living poet, Ezra Pound, had done the most to "purif[y] modern poetry of adventitious and meretricious decoration" (91). The purification inherent in Pound's "kind of preaching and teaching" was explicitly and exclusively a male activity: "an example of manly honesty rescued from a perishing tradition" (91).