Meet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950). She was a brilliant writer whose work has much to offer; her use of traditional and non-traditional forms made her a popular poet in the early 1900s among popular literary circles alike. She is not the sort of person one would like to be or perhaps not even to know personally. It is important to be able to praise an author’s work without praising their every life decision.
Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in New England to a single mother who worked hard to provide her children with access to art and education. Millay originally wanted to be a concert pianist– she had a talent for multiple forms of art– but decided to be a writer instead. She came into prominence through what seemed an accident– she entered a poem in a contest and almost won, and her published work, Renascence, garnered interest in the writing community. Millay later wrote stories, sketches, and poems for a prominent magazine and continued to publish plays and poetry collections throughout her life, despite frequently suffering from fragile mental and physical health.
Millay, as is common among poets, suffered a certain intensity of emotion which inspired her renowned love poems but also drove her numerous love affairs. With the legacy of her supportive and sacrificial mother, Millay was an avid feminist and was said to be possibly the most outspoken female writer since Sappho. Although she was brought up with a classical education and her early poems made reference to belief in a God or deity, Millay distanced herself from those origins as she adopted increasingly progressive and radical beliefs. This rejection of tradition is seen in her writing style as well: Millay’s early poems are written strictly in traditional forms and meters, especially sonnets, but become much more experimental in nature in her later works. She can thus be seen as the precursor to the modernist poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, though they ignored her for her “glibness and popularity.” However, Millay was not popular because her writing was too basic or unprofessional; she was simply more accessible than the modernist writers thanks to her use of traditional form. Her writing also reflected the spirit of the times, ranging from the disillusionment of postwar youth to the rebellion against traditional views of gender and war. With her idolization of passion and secularism, Millay is not to be emulated in the sense that she was not a Christian poet. But her poetic journey offers insight into the writing life and what it means to be “great.” After all, Millay did not even intend to become a poet in her youth, but through determination and predestination became a beloved writer.
Millay sets a model for poets by her exemplary use of form. Many poets have begun writing by sticking to traditional forms, in particular the most famous: the sonnet. Millay continued writing sonnets throughout her life to become “one of the most skillful writers of sonnets of the twenty-first century.” She did this by blending the traditional form with modern techniques and ideas. Sonnets do not have to be full of antiquated and Shakespearean language. Poets can just as easily use a sonnet to write about mental illness as they can the definition of love. But the key to being able to play with form (as modern writers like to do) is to know how to use it accurately.
A Shakespearean sonnet, as many students will know, is a poem in 14 lines with a strict meter and rhyme scheme. The meter or rhythm is called iambic pentameter and is the most natural way that most poems can be spoken. The emphasis is on every other syllable: Let ME not TO the MARriage OF true MINDS—10 syllables with 5 of them emphasized (thus the name “penta” -meter). Regarding the rhyme scheme, there are three quartets (groups of 4 lines) ending with a rhyming couplet (a group of 2 lines that rhyme with each other). If we use a letter to represent each end rhyme, the pattern goes ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. It’s not a very difficult pattern to emulate; in fact, the sonnet is one of the simplest of poetic forms (try writing a sonnet and then a villanelle for comparison). The simplicity of the sonnet is a frame within which many possibilities exist. It is up to the writer to extricate the possibility of beauty while maintaining the strict form. Millay has many examples of beautiful sonnets, and the following few are examples of the ways a sonnet can be executed in the classic style (traditional topics such as love, beauty, etc.)
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.
I shall go back again to the bleak shore
And build a little shanty on the sand,
In such a way that the extremest band
Of brittle seaweed will escape my door
But by a yard or two; and nevermore
Shall I return to take you by the hand;
I shall be gone to what I understand,
And happier than I ever was before.
The love that stood a moment in your eyes,
The words that lay a moment on your tongue,
Are one with all that in a moment dies,
A little under-said and over-sung.
But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies
Unchanged from what they were when I was young.
When I too long have looked upon your face,
Wherein for me a brightness unobscured
Save by the mists of brightness has its place,
And terrible beauty not to be endured,
I turn away reluctant from your light,
And stand irresolute, a mind undone,
A silly, dazzled thing deprived of sight
From having looked too long upon the sun.
Then is my daily life a narrow room
In which a little while, uncertainly,
Surrounded by impenetrable gloom,
Among familiar things grown strange to me
Making my way, I pause, and feel, and hark,
Till I become accustomed to the dark.
If you take the time to examine the meter of these poems, Millay does deviate slightly from the form, and her topics and metaphors may seem basic or commonplace. However, it takes a great deal of time and practice to reach Millay’s level, as well as discipline (if left to take whatever style it wants, a sonnet will inevitably deviate from its form). Once you become comfortable writing sonnets, they become easier to write and, as Millay probably found, too easy. That is when you know that you are ready to graduate to more difficult forms. For this reason, and for its place in the history of poetry, poets are encouraged to attempt sonnets if they have aspirations of proceeding to the professional level as Millay did. I hope this post was helpful or inspirational, have a great summer!
Photo Credit:
https://lithub.com/remember-the-weird-edna-st-vincent-millay-burn-in-a-lois-lowry-book/
Sources:
“Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950).” Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sonnet Central, http://www.sonnets.org/millay.htm#208.
“Edna St. Vincent Millay.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edna-st-vincent-millay.
Millay, Edna St. Vincent, and Norma Millay. Collected Poems. Harper Perennial, 2011.