Edna St. Vincent MillayReseñas

Good for melancholy and nature and being melancholy in nature. I bookmarked:
Renascence
Inland
Burial
Lament
Exiled
Ode to Silence
Sonnets ("We talk of taxes...")

"Yours is a face of which I can forget
The colour and the features, every one,
The words not ever, and the smiles not yet;
But in your day this moment is the sun
Upon a hill, after the sun has set."

Good beyond all hope.

I’m a fan of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry, so when I ran across a quotation of a few lines from this book, I decided to check it out. It’s an eighty-five-year-old stage play in verse, recounting the after-dinner talk of Ricardo, a wealthy sophisticate with a townhouse in Greenwich Village, and his six dinner guests. Since the far-ranging snippets touch on many political and social issues of the time, eight years into the Great Depression and on the eve of World War Two (with war already underway in China, Ethiopia, and Spain), I was prepared for much of the dialogue to be dated. This was less the case than I expected (sad to say).
Instead, the weakness lies in the characters. They are types, not persons: A stockbroker, a poor poet blindly defending Stalin, a frustrated fine artist who gets by on portrait commissions, a writer of short stories, a priest, and a young advertising copywriter. The exchanges, particularly heated between the broker and the poet, yield few surprises, and I didn’t notice any character development.
I was fascinated that Millay assembled an all-male group. This struck me even before the extended disquisition on the foibles of women that opened Part Two.
As for the writing: some of it, particularly the soliloquies written as sonnets, was fine. Millay displays a gift for aphorism. In addition to the lament that Babel is here and now that led me to read this, there is this on the economy: “I’m beginning to wonder what the hell / We buy that’s half so precious as what we sell.” Or this: “Hypocrisy is not to be despised, it is the pimp of Empire, but it presupposes / The existence in the community of a spiritual force for good, that must be courted and betrayed / Into connivance with evil before the planned step can be made.” As contemporary as the run-up to the Iraq War.

RENASCENCE by Edna St. Vincent Millay, was, I know, considered a groundbreaking classic in its time, and a treasured book of my mom's, but sorry, Mom. I read the whole book in about forty minutes. I just couldn't relate to all the gloom and doom, and the stilted, archaic rhyming that, to me, was reminiscent of Poe. For me it was just barely an 'okay.' I have my mother's 1917 hardback (first?) edition of the book, published by Harper & Brothers. Content-wise I couldn't recommend it. But I wonder if it's valuable.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

I deleted my original review of Eddie’s work, because, although far from pedantic, I later found it to be quite condescending. Yes, Edna loved her mother, and the believer is called on to be a “friend to sinners”, but it’s not entirely friendly to scan something or someone (like a theologian with Mozart, say) only for what’s agreeable to you, and to dismiss the rest as a pretended ‘kindness’. Eddie’s work was mostly in form or whatever, it’s true; it’s old-fashioned in this century—only very late works don’t have rhyme or beat or whatever—but!, she also turns very quickly to aristocratic sensual rebellion, to dining out and listening to love songs, and it’s only very early works that have a conventional schoolgirl religiosity about dying and rising like Jesus. (Wayne was even worse than me; although he does have anti-codependent sections of his work which it’s easy for someone like me to miss or assume he isn’t really trying to get out there, in his very peaceable synthesis-making kind of way he can be very codependent, and would have had you believe that Eddie is about Buddha/Jesus/Mohammed/Divine Source just like him, glossing over most of it.) You don’t have to agree with everything you read, or dislike everything you don’t agree with, but to read Eddie the high-class party girl poet, you kinda have to give some respect and kindness to her ‘savage beauty’ instead of being condescending and pretending that she doesn’t exist, or is more polite than she really is. That’s really seeing someone, and then, once you see people, you can know that we’re all living on the world, without being glib about it. I was kinda new to DiscountDepartment (which I’m now leaving) when I wrote this, and kinda glimmering and smiling, and unable I guess to notice deceit, or understand the anger it creates, so with someone like Eddie I was a little clueless, you know. Both her and Anne Sexton I’ll have to re-read eventually (after Shakespeare/Wordsworth/Dickinson), and although I think I like Annie better for her sheer tired honesty, her frazzled feelings that are more gentle somehow, Eddie isn’t so much the product of a different time that she needs to be forgotten, you know.

Same as the last. Poetry was awesome, but not as awesome as hoping.

I wasn't all that much of a fan honestly, and had to push myself through the second half of this one which surprised me. But I've been on a massive kick of reading poetry pieces since Sara's books last week. Maybe something more next week.

If Shakespeare be the king of the sonnet, Edna St. Vincent Millay is clearly the queen. Classically structures but incredibly modern. Sexy, depressing, beautiful.

The earliest poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Renascence: rebirth. In this poem about the freedom of the soul, Millay begins with a narrator who is measuring the limitations of his world and wishing for freedom. But when the restraints are lifted, the narrator wishes for death, and following death, for life again. Millay takes the reader through the experience of these changes, recognizing at last that limitations only exist within the person and can be overcome, even within the confines imposed by the outside world.

The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.


Interim: A poem of grief and survival that struck at a part of my heart that I sometimes try to keep closed. It begins with the poet entering a room that contains a memory of the person lost, “The room is full of you!” and proceeds through the hopeless grief to a kind of faith in tomorrow, the burden of survival.

You are not here. I know that you are gone;
And will not ever enter here again.
And yet it seems to me, if I should speak,
Your silent step must wake across the hall;

And further on:

We were so wholly one I had not thought
That we could die apart. I had not thought
That I could move,--and you be stiff and still!
That I could speak,--and you perforce be dumb!

I believe anyone who has lost a very significant person, particularly a husband or a lover, to death, would understand and feel this poem in a very personal way. And, what is poetry, if not personal?

The Suicide: A sober look at suicide and the consequences on the soul as told from the point of view of the suicide himself.

God’s World: An acclamation of nature.

Afternoon on a Hill: Simple and effective. I quite love it:

I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.

I will look at cliffs and clouds
With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind blow down the grass,
And the grass rise.

And when lights begin to show
Up from the town,
I will mark which must be mine,
And then start down!

The remaining poems are at turns immature, ineffective, maudlin or sweet, but they all show the promise that at length became a great poet.

I love this book. I don't read much poetry, but Edna St. Vincent Millay is one of the best poets I've ever read. Wonderful stuff.

Seems a little slight compared to some of the other verse I've been reading lately (excepting the Lovecraft of course), especially when I compare to Hart Crane. Kudos for actual meter and rhyme and lots of poems about dead people. I wonder what her "Unselected Poetry" is like?

I wonder why this book? Most letters boring, slight. Nothing after the 40's. The introductions are good, so just read them---unless you have time on your hands. This is not the best Edna, why do it? Methods section is a little too delighted about the LOC, and weirdly grumpy about Library "processing"beta. What a disappointment. Where is a good biography of ESVM? Where is she after all.

I’m not rating this just because I was mostly just trying to see if I could get more into poetry and I just think I prefer to read individual poems that I really like rather than a bind up from one author. I liked some of these poems and was bored by others but I definitely Milay is a very interesting poet and I think many people who are more into poetry would get a lot more out of this book than I did.

This slim book is Millay’s second collection of poems. It has two sections; the first contains 19 brief poems, the second four thematically-related sonnets. The unity of theme extends to the poem in the first section as well. Taken together, they depict the persona of a young woman confident of her power to attract and abashed in her determination to sample life to the full. At the same time, the much-quoted four-liner that opens the collection—the first “fig”—makes clear that she is aware that such a life comes only with a cost.
In their own way, these poems are as impressive as those in her first collection, Renascence, although generally more playful and assertive. They brightened a train ride on a cold, gray day.

This five-act play is a pull-out-all-the-stops fairy tale to honor Vassar College on its jubilee. The writing is by turns light-hearted and pathetic. The genius evident in poems she had written by this time is not on display, unless her descriptions of the sports activities the two young women Beatrice and Bianca share (rowing, riding, tennis) really are—as I suspect—full of Shakespeare-worthy double entendres.

Millay is a poet I never paid attention to. Perhaps it was her name. "Edna St. Vincent Millay" sounds like one of those high-minded matrons who might cringe if you use the sugar spoon to stir your tea and then put it back in the bowl. When I read Edmund Wilson’s The Twenties, I learned that its author was hopelessly in love with this elusive, willowy red-head; I became curious to read some of her work.
This, her first collection, was where I decided to start. It's a slim volume that took little more than an hour to read, even though I slowly savored it. All of the poems are good, some of them masterpieces. The title piece in particular, with its vivid description of a mystical experience, left me in awe.

I have always been fond of Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnets. It all started with Love Is Not All one evening whilst looking for something to read before going to bed. I knew then I had to seek more of her works. This sonnet is not included in this collection however but the ones that are have strengthened that fondness by a mile. To discover she was openly bisexual also sheds a new light upon her works; subtly some of them hints on same-sex relationships. Regrettably, I find rhyming poetry a little tiring these days that amidst her playfulness, creativity, sarcasm, humour, and wit — whilst fastening a lot of themes within the breaks and spaces between her vivid words enough to draw a memory or evoke a sense of a thousand emotions be it the departure of autumn, death at your fingertips ("Mine is a body that should die at sea! And have for a grave, instead of a grave Six feet deep and the length of me, All the water that is under the wave!") or the painful warfare of longing ("Searching my heart for its true sorrow, This is the thing I find to be: That I am weary of words and people, Sick of the city, wanting the sea;" and "My heart is warm with the friends I make, And better friends I'll not be knowing, Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take, No matter where it's going.") and a heartbreak ("My heart is what it was before, A house where people come and go; But it is winter with your love, The Sashes are beset with snow." and "And what are you that, wanting you, I should be kept awake As many nights as there are days With weeping for your sake?") — has turned off my enjoyment overall. Despite this personal gripe of mine there's no question hers are one of the best rhyming poetry I've read so far in comparison to W.H. Auden's whose poetry collection I haven't finished yet due to them being twice as taxing although Funeral Blues and O Tell Me The Truth About Love (funny little thing how this one involves nose-picking) have always been my personal favourites.

For all of us ageing:
"Was it for this I uttered prayers,
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half-past eight?"
— GROWN-UP

As a side note, I dearly liked these: Indifference, Time does not bring relief; you all have lied, If I should learn, in some quite casual way, The Dream, I shall forget you presently, my dear, MacDougal Street, Passer Mortuus Est, Travel, Exiled, Grown-up, Recuerdo, Thursday, Ebb, We all talk of taxes, and I call you friend, Alms, and I know I am but summer to your heart.½

Oh, Modernism, old friend - how I've missed you and your whackadoodle self. I liked quite a few of these poems, but sometimes they felt a bit sing-songy to me, which I'm not a fan of. I think Millay can come off as overly dramatic at times (well, she is a poet). I wish there were more poems in her oeuvre like "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver." Read my full review here.

This small book features some of Millay's early poetry. As with most collections, the poetry appeal varies from poem to poem. This collection, originally published in 1920, was expanded when republished in 1922. The "figs" were a couple of very short poems. I enjoyed the poems from the day when rhyme mattered.½

Like him who day by day unto his draught
Of delicate poison adds him one drop more
Till he may drink unharmed the death of ten,
Even so, inured to beauty, who have quaffed
Each hour more deeply than the hour before,
I drink—and live—what has destroyed some men.

While I enjoyed "Renascence" and the longer poems that constitute the first half of this book, it was the closing six sonnets, especially "Bluebeard," that bumped the collection from three stars to four. Millay's style retains much of the formality and passion of the 19th century Romantics, but interjects perspectives that reflect a Modern aesthetic. In this way, she reminds me of Frost and other poets who bridged Modernism and Romanticism.

This was a decent collection of poetry by the famed poet, noted for her simple rhymes and layered poems. I found most of them to be palatable and that they were briskly able to be read through, one after the other, in succession to gain a greater understanding of the poet herself and what she thought, felt, and lived for. Overall, a good read and one for poetry enthusiasts.

3.25 stars.

One of my favorites:

An Ancient Gesture
I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
Penelope did this too.
And more than once: you can't keep weaving all day
And undoing it all through the night;
Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight;
And along towards morning, when you think it will never be light,
And your husband has been gone, and you don't know where, for years.
Suddenly you burst into tears;
There is simply nothing else to do.

And I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
This is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique,
In the very best tradition, classic, Greek;
Ulysses did this too.
But only as a gesture,—a gesture which implied
To the assembled throng that he was much too moved to speak.
He learned it from Penelope...
Penelope, who really cried.

Thank you From

~~~~~~~~~
"Penelope, who really cried"….

Such strength in an envitalized metaphor -- tears.
The last stanza remembers the crocodile tears of Ulysses who only pretended to be moved, in order to avoid addressing the crowd of suitors. Penelope had really wept nightly in worry and fear, and curiously faithfully. Waiting twenty years for her husband to return from his Trojan lark.½

A closet drama in verse dealing with interwar intellectual and political issues. While it might have been of interest in its own day, it doesn't hold up well.

The poem "Travel" reminded me of Freya Stark in it's restlessness and sense of adventure. To look at train tracks and wonder where they end up. To watch a plane make its way across the sky, the contrails fading bit by bit, and guess its final destination. Who hasn't done that?

The poem I focused on from A Few Figs From Thistles is "The Unexplorer" (p 24). It is an incredibly short poem about a little girl who asks her mother where the road by their house leads. The mother replies it ends at the milk-man's door. For some reason that information suddenly ends the little girl's desire to go down the road. I am of a darker mind when I think the little girl is afraid of the milk-man and doesn't want to run into him when really it could be she thinks the milk-man's front door is not an exciting enough destination. So she has put it out of her mind. She is no longer curious. That's the thing about poetry. It is ambiguous enough that it could mean anything you want it to.