Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Poetess Tradition

It is taken for granted today that Edna St. Vincent Millay's poetry detailed the sexual and social liberation of the modern woman. But why, critics ask, does she represent the emergence of modernity in such distinctly un-modern poetic forms? While the work of her female contemporaries, such as H. D. and Marianne Moore, distances itself from the nineteenth-century conventions of the genre, the majority of Millay's poetry evoked them; her work was conservative in the sense that she conserved past traditions. A number of critics, among them Robert Johnson and Jane Stanbrough, have attempted to make sense of the apparently problematic opposition between her subversive ethos and her traditional forms. They have thus concluded that Millay exercises a healthy poetic restraint, containing modern emotional unruliness and vulnerability within self-imposed and protective formal limitations.¹ Millay's poetic self-discipline assuaged and explained the conflict between innovative content and conventional form.

I want to suggest that such an approach insists upon a conflict where none exists. Millay's conservative forms communicate rather than confine a modernist affect and intuition. She taps into a poetic tradition that has always expressed emotional insight through conservative poetic conventions. Her poetic restraint derives from her literary lineage as a practitioner of the poetess tradition, which emerged in eighteenth-century England, achieved immense popularity in the nineteenth-century United States, and persisted, as Millay demonstrates, within twentieth-century modernism. In this essay I situate Millay's early poetry collections, Renascence and Other Poems (1917) and A Few Figs from Thistles (1921), within the tradition of antebellum American poetess poetry. In doing so, I engage many of the interpretive challenges this tradition has incurred, most notably the conflation of the woman poet with her poem.² The poetess was published and popular in the nineteenth century because she appeared to offer her private thoughts to a reading public. This profession constituted both the poetess's allure and her greatest difficulty, however. Her poems had to convincingly communicate to readers the thoughts and feelings of a woman who was moral, sincere, and idealized. In other words, the poetess publicly performed her privacy, which ultimately rendered her consumable and forgettable because she relinquished the interiority that would otherwise establish her as an abiding, autonomous literary figure.³ This vexed poetess tradition inflects Millay's modernism; she redeploys the faulty expectation that women poets profess privacy in order to disrupt the ideal intimacy associated with women's poetry.

While scholars have recovered and analyzed poetess poetry from the nineteenth-century United States, the lasting influence of this poetic tradition on later works has not yet been established. It is time to start drawing lines from the nineteenth-century poetess onward. In "The Poet as Poetess," Virginia Jackson addresses the difficulty of studying this literary figure. As a "trope in a rather pure sense, as definite and slippery as a turn of phrase, the trope of the Poetess worked differently at different moments over the course of the nineteenth century" (57). In this essay I offer a historical solution to the problem that Jackson identifies: the practice of ahistorically idealizing the poetess "as a hologram of readerly desire" (54). By investigating shifting notions of women's poetic privacy, I trace historical iterations of the poetess in order to draw her beyond the nineteenth century and into the modernist period. By overtly writing within the poetess tradition, Millay, more than other comparable women modernists, made explicit the problems of private female expression in the early twentieth century. She highlighted and reclaimed the woman poet's specific inheritance in her conservative approach to modernist quandaries. In a sense, American modernism was underpinned by the poetess's problematic privacy.⁴ An awareness of people's alienation despite urban proximity and the question of personified versus objectified private emotion as a potential means of reconnection led modern poets to examine the authenticity and feasibility of interiority and to question the existence of actual privacy. By the twentieth century, the woman poet's problems with privacy were blended or dissolved amid the larger investigations of the movement. Where...