Here is Edna St Vincent (”Vincent”) Millay in 1913, when she was 21. Her long poem Renascence had gained her a degree of acclaim the previous year by coming third in The Lyric Year competition – it was widely regarded as the best poem by far in the resulting volume – including by the winner, who said he felt his prize was an embarrassment – which resulted in a scholarship to Vassar, among other things.
Here is the beginning of Renascence:
All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I’d started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.
Over these things I could not see;
These were the things that bounded me;
And I could touch them with my hand,
Almost, I thought, from where I stand.
And all at once things seemed so small
My breath came short, and scarce at all.
But, sure, the sky is big, I said;
Miles and miles above my head;
So here upon my back I’ll lie
And look my fill into the sky.
And so I looked, and, after all,
The sky was not so very tall.
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,
And — sure enough! — I see the top!
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I ‘most could touch it with my hand!
And reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.
I screamed, and — lo! — Infinity
Came down and settled over me…
Millay’s collection Second April – one of her prodigious output of books – was published in 1921.
Millay was, I may as well say here, a huge influence on me as a child. I’m sure I’ve written that before. I was given a book of her poems edited for children at about age 7, and read and read it. They were so simple! They were fun! “We were very tired, we were very merry/ we went back and forth all night on the ferry” – once you’ve read that and know it’s poetry, you never have to be afraid of poetry again.
Older, I read the sonnets, of which I do feel some people miss the point nowadays. Yes, they are written in flowery, “sonnet” language. But they are poems about sex and love written by a young woman in the teens and twenties, so the content alone was shocking enough. Plus she livedin Greenwich Village and was bisexual. Millay was fiercely intelligent and independent and sure of her own identity as a writer – and as a woman – at a time when middle-class women didn’t work after marriage (she had an open marriage for 26 years and was devastated when her husband died), women couldn’t vote, and to be a brainy woman must have seemed almost a contradiction in terms. And she was very pretty, too. (All the pictures I’ve ever seen of her showe her wearing simple, chic, dark clothing, with white blouses: very elegant.) And her letters are wonderful. Happy Second April.
Picture details: Edna St. Vincent Millay at Mitchell Kennerley’s house in Mamaroneck, New York, by Arnold Genthe. Autochrome made 1913. I know the picture looks a bit girly-wirly (but then, so do Steichen’s photographs, for example, of New York) but I do love her dress.
4 Comments
April 3, 2008 at 8:03 am
I agree…she has been a bit overlooked (whilst others get looked at and relooked at and totally overexposed). Plus it’s good to see the other ‘f word’ come bounding out of the closet (one of my friends had a partner so gloomy and cruel and funless that she used to say to her kids ‘don’t mention the ‘f word’ in front of your father…and she didn’t mean the four letter one).
April 3, 2008 at 10:31 am
I have seen this photo a zillion times, but always before in black and white. Is there any reason to believe it was not colored after the fact? (Or, on the other hand, do you know that it wasn’t?)
My experience has been that Millay is greatly beloved by adolescents and those with an ideological ax to grind (usually of the “What do you mean, great women poets are hard to find?” variety). And she was adored by those who knew her. She must have been amazingly attractive and magnetic in person–cf. Edmund Wilson, who never really got over her–even at readings; but the spell seems to me to have faded as she retreated from first-hand memory. There are writers like that, whose power seems to have depended on personal presence. Leavis is another such (though prodigiously unlike Millay in every other way).
On the other hand, when I say stuff like this, I am frequently met with, “Men! You are such idiots.”
April 3, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Rachel – well, Rachel and Richard – I think you’re giving me two sides of the initial question here.
I’m not sure that Millay is unjustly overlooked, as such; her poetry does in fact ignore much of what it could have taken on board. She’s no Modernist, to go back to an earlier discussion. It may have been another ten years until The Waste Land, but HD was writing in 1912… and Pound. But it was early days and it’s moot whether Millay would have even known of them at that stage. But what it does mean, as the world blew open right around that time, is that her poetry looks more dated than it otherwise would have. After all, even literary history is written by the victors.
It’s like Isaac Rosenberg: the worst thing that could have happened to him in that sense was to get taken up by the New Georgians. Although he wrote my number one favourite first world war poem, he also wrote a lot of execrable pansy verse in which his talent is only apparent. He couldn’t help it.
Anyway, being brutal, Millay’s work is often dated, and it is often quite girly. And some of it is just stock stuff: even “Second April” the title poem, for which this post wastitled – it’s just cardboard cut-out join-the-dots stuff, really. But when she is good she is SO charming, AND refreshing, and often uncompromising, in fact. How could anyone not love “Recuerdo”? And her “Couting-Out Rhyme” is one of my favourite poems ever, as well. I think it’s a shame to just dismiss her. She’s marvellous. I love her simplicity, and that is a big and hard thing to achieve.
The girly thing is a problem, and maybe I WILL have to go back and do my previously-intended post on the Orange Prize… the fact is that hyper-masculine writing is not called “men’s writing” in the same way that feminine writing is called “women’s writing” – I have read SO many novels in my time, by major internationally-feted writers, where the sexism or even borderline (being generous here) misogyny of the books was not regarded as any kind of an issue at all. Or if it was, it was, “this uncompromising look at the gender wars” – or worse: “this rollicking romp.” But let a woman sound like a woman, or forget that she’s supposed to be big and uncompromising, and suddenly it is “women’s writing.” I DO believe this. I believe the masculine values are more valued in public discourse than the feminine ones, and also in Modernism, as it happens.
Of course, the thing is that they are more valued by a lot of women, too, and this is why it is interesting. See, there is a post there.
Now. The picture is an autochrome, which means it was originally produced as a colour picture. Autochromes were a few years old by the teens. They were invented by the tireless Lumiere brothers, and were more popular with hobbyists than with art photographers, because the technical aspects were very cumbersome and didn’t allow the control of black-&-white. They are wonderful things, though, like the Polaroids of their day. That wonderful ethereal effect you get is all caused by chemicals.
April 3, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Thanks for the information. I’d never heard of autochrome. I assumed from the constant reproduction of the photo in black and white that it was a black and white photo. Shows you what I know. Reproduction in color must be prohibitively expensive, which is a shame.