Selected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay: An Annotated Edition ed. by Timothy F. Jackson (review)

This beautifully produced new edition takes as its raison d’être the scholarly neglect of Millay’s poetry. It opens with a valuable introduction by Holly Peppe, Millay’s literary executor, who begins by recounting her surprise upon first discovering how little the academy thought of Millay. Peppe’s story will resonate with many students and scholars of Millay’s poetry, who have similarly asked, “Why was Millay missing from the American literary canon?” (xxxii). As Peppe notes, Millay never had a problem attracting a general audience. In her lifetime, she was a bestselling author as well as a popular performer and radio broadcaster. Her Collected Poems, which first appeared in 1956, has never gone out of print. But Millay’s academic reputation is another matter. Since John Crowe Ransom famously accused her, in his 1937 essay “The Poet as Woman,” of writing sentimental, excessive poetry, scholars have mostly treated Millay as a minor or merely popular poet. Narratives of modernism still relegate Millay to the footnotes, along with other popular women poets of the period such as Sara Teasdale, Louise Bogan, and Elinor Wylie. As a result of this marginalization, Millay’s sister Norma Millay, who tended to the poet’s legacy following her death in 1950, came to view scholars as enemies. Peppe even includes a poem that Norma wrote expressing her disdain for the academy:

Out from the universitiesHop the parasitic fleas,The newly appointed PhD’s.Doctors and critics overnight,They write and write and write and write.

(xv)

The volume’s primary goal, as Timothy F. Jackson explains in the “Editorial Method” section, is to encourage “neglected and often overlooked approaches to reading and studying Millay” (xxxix). This is an alluring proposition for a figure as understudied and underappreciated as Millay. During the past thirty years, Millay scholarship has, thankfully, progressed beyond the near dearth that Peppe encountered as a graduate student in 1981 (xiii), but as Peppe and Jackson suggest, we still need more and more varied scholarship on Millay. To inspire such reconsiderations, Jackson has assembled the widest selection of Millay’s writing to date. The anthology showcases the poet’s range with selections from thirteen of her books of poetry, beginning with Millay’s first collection, Renascence and Other Poems (1917), through the posthumously published Mine the Harvest (1954). The volume also contains archival material, including four previously unpublished and uncollected poems, among them, “E. St. V. M.,” a sly self-portrait from the 1920s, and “Thanksgiving . . . 1950,” written near the end of the poet’s life. The latter poem provides a striking example of the political anxieties that pervade Millay’s later writing. Still haunted by World War II, Millay nonetheless “Gives thanks for the harvest of a troubled year” (228).

Because Millay’s early romantic poems have been the focus of most previous scholarship, the anthology places greater emphasis on her writing from the 1930s and 1940s. This shift in perspective seems aptly timed. In reacquainting myself with Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939), I was particularly struck by the precarity of Millay’s historical moment. In “The Snow Storm,” for instance, Millay subtly blends the personal and the political:

Forceless upon our backs there fallInfrequent flakes hexagonal,Devised in many a curious styleTo charm our safety for a while,Where close to earth like mice we goUnder the horizontal snow.

(178)

During the 1940s, Millay produced what she termed “propaganda” for the war effort (xxvii). These anti-fascist, pro-war poems—some of which are collected in Make Bright the Arrows: 1940 Notebook (1940)—have largely dominated our memory of Millay at midcentury. But Jackson reminds us of the lesser-known lyrics that also emerged out of this chaos.

Jackson’s editorial work is also valuable. In most cases he has presented the poems as they appear in first editions of single...