Collected Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay

HarperPerennial. New York, 1988

Not long after making her debut upon the world of American literary modernism, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s frank voice and deft talent earned her work canonical status, while delineating herself as a “national symbol of the modern woman.” In both her poetic and personal life, however, Millay’s modern womanhood is clearly an identity in transition, liberated from Victorian mores and yet enamored with the romanticist legacy of her literary predecessors. It is the fusion of these two spheres, the amalgam of modernity and tradition, for which much of Millay’s poetry is most admiredŸ and nowhere are the results more gloriously evident than in her impressively broad collection of sonnets.

In the revised and expanded edition of Collected Sonnets, Elizabeth Barnett quotes Millay’s own assessment of the sonnet’s dual virtues in her preface. Referring to Wordsworth’s poems, Millay writes, on the one hand, that she loves the sonnet as “a peculiarly, a magically beautiful form of poetryŸ” but one which also, “like a sharp‘tongued wife, pulled Wordsworth together, made him pull up his socks, told him to shut up, when he had finished what he had to say.” The duality possible within such a form, at once exacting in its strictures and tailor made for the fancy of romanticism, is evident even in Millay’s tone shift here—the elegance of her first statement, and the frank efficacy of the second.

The principle carries over to sonnets from collections such as A Few Figs from Thistles and The Harp Weaver, where form and verse of traditional grace contain an honesty of voice and experience peculiar to the modern woman and, until penned by Millay, unfamiliar to the sonnet’s repertoire. At times, Millay’s frankness is almost cold in its utter rejection of the gendered standards associated with her chosen form: within the same mould into which Shakespeare and Petrarch poured words to immortalize love and beauty are found Millay’s “I shall forget you presently, my dear,” or the stinging “I, being born a woman and distressed” Œ“…urged by your propinquity to find your person fair,” yet “Think not for this, however…I shall remember you with love, or season/ My scorn with pity,—let me make it plain”).