It’s funny you know I so want to like Edna Saint Really Long Name and I don’t mean anything bad by that. That was just my first impression and I didn’t remember her name until I had to. Did you know that she invented the my cat typed this memo meme? But in her day it was a typewriter. It’s easier for our lazy cats today.
Some say Edna ushered in the era of structured lazing and then she was replaced almost immediately by unstructured lazing. She had to defend herself and shook her popularity at them. Popularity is undefeated just ask Sasha. And Edna St Vincent Millay was really really popular. She might have been the first and last rock star poet – to use a term that hadn’t been invented yet. Imagine that. I know this stuff now but two weeks ago I didn’t know where to begin. I asked a writer friend about her and he said she took enough morphine to turn stairs into a philosophical debate about direction.
That seemed a strange place to begin. When confronted about his triggered ad hominem he deflected by crossing his legs like a girl. It’s easy to make fun of things but you can’t deny the deftness exhibited throughout her many sonnets all the while imprisoned or released by meter and rhyme. And she didn’t just write sonnets. To be fair to my friend he did say that her life is threaded through her sonnets in a way that made his joke fair game. It seems everything is fair game when you are talking out of your future.
Here is a skill she might have used in the future. She wrote this bit of poetry to her publisher.
139 Waverly Place,
New York City.
March 1st, 1918
Dear Harriet Monroe, ---
Spring is here, ---and I could be very happy, except that I am broke.
Would you mind paying me now instead of on publication for those
so stunning verses of mine which you have? I am become very, very
thin, and have taken to smoking Virginia tobacco,
Wistfully yours,
Edna St. Vincent Millay.
P.S. I am awfully broke. Would you mind paying me a lot?
Imagine her Gofundme skills.
https://millayhouserockland.org/vincent-biography
Because this is what I do I kept thinking while watching a documentary or looking at snippets of biographies of how we shape a past to fit our present selves. I started my examination by looking at the first descriptive words and some of the most common words are: Poet, Feminist, Political activist, Pulitzer. I’ll stop there. The thing that stands out to me is one is not like the others and is easily the second most used label and often put in front of Poet. Three of the words might have been used as a description in her own lifetime; Poet, Political, and Pulitzer. The three Ps luckily enough for me. Feminist has been given to her from the Future. It’s almost like we use defining the past to our own personal ends.
As I continued learning and reading more of her wonderful things, then onto reading modern analyses of her poems there is one particular poem I kept seeing and this maybe can go toward some other matter that I’ve been pondering, what exactly is a feminist? I might have found a partial answer (with example). This is the poem.
I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity,—let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.
https://poemanalysis.com/edna-st-vincent-millay/i-being-born-a-woman-and-distressed
When a non -ist person reads this vividly human poem they see a particular man. When a feminist reads it they see all men.
Would she have wanted to be claimed by feminist scholars? Maybe. Maybe not. She might have smirked at the thought that the girl who burned at both ends is now the torch they carry.
During this research the thing that weirded me out the most is a recording of her voice. That ain’t no American voice I ever hoid. Maybe I’m talking from the future here but you would be hard pressed convincing me that she walked around speaking like this. It has to be a put on poet voice. At first it was excruciating like nails on a chalkboard that hasn’t been seen in a classroom for forty years. So who really knows what that feels like? Ask Grandma – you’ll love her reaction. Or maybe you’ll find her voice charming. I found it scary. – Candace
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.
Leave a Reply