Lovers and Thinkers, Into the Earth with You
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I shall forget you presently, my dear, So make the most of this, your little day, Your little month, your little half a year…
Please, behave yourself, Ms. Millay.
One can imagine a few of her elders pulling her aside to gently chastise the young poet as she began to wade her way through the literary swamps of the early 20th century. Later in her career, when not being openly attacked, she was largely ignored by the ascendant modernist literati for having the gall to be romantic.
But early on, Edna St. Vincent Millay (her friends called her Vincent) was one of the last of a now-extinct species: the popular American poet.
Beautiful. Bisexual (before it was fashionable). Feminist (before it was crazed). Razor-sharp. Self-destructive. Millay was that. And if you can forgive a smidge of morbidity, she was a well-staged suicide away from landing a Hollywood biopic. But should we not attempt to get beyond the culture of personality worship, this rotating pantheon of drug-addled, self-obsessed celebrities? Should any of this soap opera nonsense really matter to art, to life?
Ha ha ha.
Should?
Should is not the issue. These things do matter and they will always matter. Our obsession with other people and their antics has its hooks deep in you and me whether we admit to it or hide behind talk of “separating the artists from their art.” Yes, the artist’s primary responsibility is to their work. Still, for us, that reprehensible band of chumps, The Public, any attempt to permanently divorce the artist’s work from their life is a futile attempt to divorce life itself. And although life is a bloody mess, we love to watch the blood fly…from a safe distance, of course.
The public started losing interest in poetry when the poets started becoming professors. Professors wear sweaters and can’t remember where they put that umbrella. Professors have read more books than you and definitely won't lord it over anyone. Professors explain the current and historical contexts. Professors will help you become a thought-full citizen. Booooooring. You can’t breed poet with professor and keep the booooooring out, no matter how much talent and eccentricity you throw into the mix. There’s simply not enough risk or blood in higher education to interest anyone for very long.
Millay wasn’t a professor. She wrote for a living, and left a slew of lovers in her wake while smoldering through the years, as reflected in her poems. Here's “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why”:
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten, and what arms have lain Under my head till morning; but the rain Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh Upon the glass and listen for reply, And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain For unremembered lads that not again Will turn to me at midnight with a cry. Thus in winter stands the lonely tree, Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, Yet knows its boughs more silent than before: I cannot say what loves have come and gone, I only know that summer sang in me A little while, that in me sings no more.
Accessible and evocative, there’s little room for the “I don’t get it!” of those poor unfortunates who never received a degree in English Lit. This isn’t to say difficulty is bad. Obscurity in art is bad (yes, there are always exceptions); difficulty in art is only bad when there is nothing behind it.
Throughout her work, Millay’s voice is powerful and independent, often overwhelming with its wit and self-aware, subversive knowledge. Even when she dips into melancholy, as above, she maintains her power. Woman as player: all those “unremembered lads”, the degeneracy!
Here, the worldly context, our poet as prolific lover, in no way takes away from the glory of the poem. Of course, if the poem does not deliver then the poet would have a problem. As the critic Thomas Graves has said, “good poetry hides”. We can forgive the artist or entertainer who elevates or entertains us. Failure to do so…well, you’re just another reprobate nudging civilization towards total collapse.
Millay unabashedly embodied a poetics that explored the terribly old-fashioned themes of love, death, and nature while remaining modern. Yes, even today one can be modern and write sonnets. To be modern at any time is simply to be very, very good.
For Millay, no problem.
She had that rare combination of glamor and substance. If we live in an entertainment age (we do), then one can either moan on and on about the lack of substance or put in the effort to dress up the substantial in an alluring costume.
In “The Fitting”, the speaker is being fitted by a “hardworking woman with a familiar and unknown face” who remarks that she has lost weight. All the better, the speaker replies (“tant mieux”). Soon the saleswoman comes in, repeating the remark:
Ah, que madame a maigri!” cried the vendeuse, coming in with dresses over her arm. “C’est la chaleur,” I said, looking into the sunny tops of the horse-chestnuts—and indeed it was very warm. I stood for a long time so, looking into the afternoon, thinking of the evening and you… While they murmured busily in the distance, turning me, touching my secret body, doing what they were paid to do.
Millay bites in many of her poems, but with artistry. And here her blend of bite and fine-tuned feeling is not aimed at the tailor or the saleswoman exactly but takes in and then transcends the superficiality of the situation: stood there, being measured, chatted up, touched, all the while blissfully daydreaming as the world rambles on around her. We are invited to take part in the superiority of the imaginative world.
Speaking of superiority…
T.S. Eliot, by most if not all accounts the most talented English-language poet of the 20th century, was never a popular poet like Millay. He became a poetic institution of sorts, sure. But hordes of hormone-ravaged neophytes w9n’t be clamoring to read “Prufrock and Other Observations” anytime soon, as brilliant as it is.
He was and always will be popular with poets (damn the man could write) and that small subset of the population who pride themselves on their hard-won “good taste.” But for Eliot, a poem like “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why” is too sentimental, too adolescent. Old Possum, they called him. Possums aren’t renowned for their sentimentality or sex appeal, as their wives can attest.
People, The Public, need to be seduced into poetry. Eliot is nine months into the relationship when the couple starts to reveal their respective monsters. When you’re getting down to brass tacks, at least poetry-wise, he’s essential, but you don’t want him on the ground floor attempting to woo prospective clients.
We want Lord Byron on a Greek ship sailing into battle, we want a young Plath biting her future husband Ted Hughes on the cheek, we want Ginsberg holding a “POT IS FUN” sign with flowers in his hair. As questionable as these wants are, we want, we want, we want.
No, these gestures, these poses, do not enhance the poem, but yes, they certainly enhance the story and glamor surrounding poetry. The modern insistence on separating the text from its author, while a perfectly fine tool for criticism, sucks all the joy and vigor from the pose of the poet.
It’s difficult to imagine a professor today attempting, let alone pulling off, the pose taken in Millay’s “Dirge Without Music”:
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned. Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you. Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust. A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew, A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost. The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,-- They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve. More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world. Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
O Vincent, where are your sons and daughters now?
We're not living in the waste land yet. The battle to elevate American Poetry above academic chattering or cringy social media dross may very well be a foolish and losing one. I know. But I do not approve…
Such a good clarion call for sentimental glorious accessible poetry - still hard, still good writing - that elevates the multitudes!
How refreshing to see her name again! I fell in love with Edna St. Vincent Millay in my late teens. In college I gifted a copy of her complete works to a classmate. A decade later I ran into her and was shocked to find out she spent some time in prison. She told me she was able to get her copy of Millay’s poetry and read it over and over while incarcerated. She told me that ‘Edna St. Vincent Millay saved her life’. Yes, the Public needs this kind of poetry.