text:
1. Adler, Amy. Rev. of Edna St. Vincent Millay: Poet, by Carolyn Daffron. School Library Journal 36 (Mar. 1990): 243.
While few students are familiar with M's poems, "even fewer understand [their] impact on the political and social structure of her time." Daffron's book will be welcomed by students once they are introduced to it.
2. Agosta, Lucien L. "Millay, Edna St. Vincent." Notable Women in the American Theatre. Ed. Alice M. Robinson, Vera Mowry Roberts, and Milly S. Barranger. New York: Greenwood, 1989. 640-44.
Lists M's contributions to American theater. She "attended at the birth of serious American drama and helped to create an atmosphere in which it could flourish."
3. Alkalay-Gut, Karen. "Poetry by Women in America: Esthetics in Evolution." Canadian Review of American Studies 14 (1983): 239-56.
M is named as being among "the first burst of women poets who wrote as women, from the point of view of women, with the concerns of women." She is among those who had "something to say about being female." Finds that M engages in "hiding" and in "protecting the self," often using a male persona and identifying with a male perspective.
4. Allen, Gilbert. "Millay and Modernism." Critical Essays on Edna St. Vincent Millay. Ed. William B. Thesing. Boston: Hall, 1993. 266-72.
Original to this volume. Discussion of Popular Modernism and High Modernism and M's place in the movements. She scorned High Modernism and tried to satisfy "both her traditional sense of eloquence and the demands of her many subjects." While M's reputation declined, the "overall quality" of her work did not. Her "stylistic uncertainty" and her social consciousness poems place her outside the High Modernism movement. Her place in 20th century poetry is not yet defined.
5. American Theatre Companies, 1888-1930. Ed. Weldon B. Durham. New York: Greenwood, 1987.
Brief mention of M as an important writer whose plays were produced by the Provincetown Players.
6. Anderson, Maxwell. "Second April." Critical Essays on Edna St. Vincent Millay. Thesing. 37-38.
Reprinted from The Measure No. 7 (Sept. 1921): 17. Review of SA. The major flaw is the frequent use of insignificant or fantastic themes. The virtues include "an almost flawless sensitiveness to phrase," definiteness of object, and accurate, homely imagery. The sonnets show that M has matured personally since RN.
7. August, Bonnie Tymorski. "The Poetic Use of Womanhod in Five Modern American Poets: Moore, Millay, Rukeyser, Levertov, and Plath." Diss. New York U, 1978. DAI-A 39/06 (1978): 3576.
Views M as assuming the persona of "an idealized emancipated woman." M rejects traditional female roles, but she seems unable to find a suitable "masculine role." For her and the other women in this study the issue of power is central, but they feel distanced from "characteristically male definitions of power."
8. Bak, Hans. Malcolm Cowley: The Formative Years. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1993.
Brief mentions of Cowley's meetings with and opinions about M.
9. Rev. of Ballad of the Harp Weaver. Kirkus Reviews 59 (Aug. 1 1991 part 3): 1290.
Comments on text and illustrations separately. Poem is a timely "hauntingly tragic fantasy." Cites "dramatic appeal and mesmerizing rhythm." See #11.
10. Rev. of Ballad of the Harp Weaver. Publisher's Weekly 238 (18 Oct. 1991): 61.
Considers it "a disturbing book," "an odd choice for the basis of a children's book," which is how it is classified here. It ends with the death of the mother, "every child's worst fear." Wonders where this book will find an audience. See #11.
11. Barnett, Elizabeth. "About the Poet." The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver, by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Illus. Beth Peck. New York: Philomel, 1991. N. pag.
Introduction to a child's picture book illustrating the poem. A brief summary of M's early life with her mother and sisters appears in the introduction. Quotes from M's letters to show her love for her mother.
12. - - -. Preface. Collected Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Rev. and expanded ed. New York: Harper, 1988. xii-xv.
Includes a brief comment by M on Wordsworth's sonnets, which she says she read "over and over" once she overcame an initial reluctance to try them. Comments also on Norma Millay's introduction to this collection.
13. Beake, Fred. "The Thing and the Imagination of It: Reviews of Recent Poetry." Stand 34 (Winter 1992): 80-84.
Short review of SP. "Millay seems to triumph over her manner. A very particular, very deep mood is conveyed, and this is her particular gift and claim to longevity."
14. Bernikow, Louise. Review of Millay in Greenwich Village, by Anne Cheney. New York Times Book Review 16 Nov. 1975: 22.
Summarizes form and content of Millay in Greenwich Village. Finds the subject of the book, M, "worth writing about." The subject, however, demands new material or a creative view of history, both of which are lacking in Cheney's book.
15. Biel, Steven. Independent Intellectuals in the United States, 1910-1945. The American Social Experience Ser. 25. New York: New York U P, 1992.
Cultural history of non-institutional, public intellectuals. Names M as one of group of "remarkable women" in Greenwich Village in the 1920s. Discusses Edmund Wilson's I Thought of Daisy and his use of M as the model for the character Rita, who represents the world of ideas.
16. Bodurtha, Richard. "Moments With Millay." Washington Post 27 Dec. 1983, sec. B: 7.
Author spent a month at Steepletop as companion to Norma Millay, who was in frail health. Recounts conversations with her and her recitation of M's poetry. Describes cabin which M used as her writing studio.
17. Bogan, Louise. "Conversion Into Self." Thesing. 67-68.
Reprinted from Poetry 45 (Feb. 1935): 277-79. Review of WFG. Initial paragraph on artist's difficulty in achieving maturity. "The conversion into his later, out of his earlier, self, without reference to modern or ancient idiocies, continues to be a problem worthy of his entire powers." "Edna Millay at last gives evidence that she recognizes and is prepared to meet the task of becoming a mature and self-sufficing woman and artist."
18. - - -. Rev. of Make Bright the Arrows. Thesing. 87-88.
Reprinted from New Yorker 16 (28 Dec. 1940): 62. The current renaissance beginning in 1912 has run its course. Many of the poets are beginning to sound alike. They have reverted to the mean, the middle class. While this volume is sincere, it regresses to the stock sentiments of the post-WWI era. M takes no account of the poets who have parodied and analyzed this sentimentality.
19. Bowles, Gloria. Louise Bogan's Aesthetic of Limitation. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1987.
Literary biography of Bogan. Discusses Bogan's reviews of M's poetry that ended their friendship. Sees M in the context of Bogan's attitude to women poets and feminism and her demands on herself.
20. Brantley, William. "The Force of Flippancy: Edna Millay's Satiric Sketches of the Early 1920's." Colby Quarterly 27 (Sept. 1991): 132-47
M's satire has "rarely been given the recognition it merits in a full assessment of her career." Describes the short stories published under her own name and the pseudonym "Nancy Boyd." Mainly concerned with the volume DD. Relates M to Dorothy Parker and H. L. Mencken as a "debunking satirist."
21. Brazeau, Peter. Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered. San Francisco: North Point, 1985.
Two mentions of M in this collection of oral histories of Wallace Stevens. In the first, Elva McCormick, who ran a bookstore in Hartford, Conn., said she did not sell Stevens' work in the same quantity that she sold M's. "When a new one of hers came out, you had a big list of people who wanted to be sure to get her first edition." In the second, Elder Olson, who was associated with the University of Chicago, tells how he met Stevens at a lecture there in 1951. Compares him to other poets Olson had seen including M. "Edna Millay was the medieval princess, fatigued by too many chivalric romances."
22. "Brief Mention." American Literature 54 (Oct. 1982): 487.
Notice of softcover reprint of Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Down East Books. Observes that it is not likely to be superseded until "the ruling critical tastes change sweepingly."
23. Brittin, Norman A. Edna St. Vincent Millay. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1982.
Differs from 1967 first edition. Reduces space used for biography by selecting biographical material only for its importance to M's poetry. Discusses prose writings, M as a feminist, and M's poetry in relation to High Modernism. Further attention to individual poems.
24. - - -. Rev. of Millay in Greenwich Village, by Anne Cheney. Southern Humanities Review 12 (Winter 1978): 73-74.
Highly critical of Cheney's accuracy and general interpretation. Focuses on influences on M, dating of poems, map of Greenwich Village. Corrects own statement in entry above that M wrote the sonnet "Lord Archer, Death" for John Reed.
25. Brooks, E. Burns. "Journey Toward the West: An Asian Prosodic Journey in the Year 1972." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 35 (1975): 221-74.
A discourse on Chinese versification. Quotes a line from M's "Ashes of Life" to illustrate the English heptameter line, to which the Chinese seven-syllable line roughly corresponds.
26. Brophy, James A., Jr. "The Harp Weaver: An Experiment with Millay's Poetry in Grade Six." Tamarack (Fall 1985-Winter 1986): 61-63.
Tells of influence of M's poems on a sixth-grade class in winning them over to poetry. They went on to read other of M's poems and then other poets.
27. Bunge, Charles A. "Current Reference Books." Wilson Library Bulletin (Mar. 1978): 645.
Review of Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Reference Guide, by Judith Nierman. Nierman acknowledges her debt to Norman Brittin, who included an annotated bibliography in his Twayne Series volume on M. Says that Nierman's work will "extend [her] predecessor's usefully."
28. Burch, Francis F., Jr. "Millay's 'Not in a Silver Casket Cool with Pearls.'" Explicator 48 (Summer 1990): 277-79.
Finds an overlooked source for this poem in Alphonse Daudet's novel Sapho. Sapho, a courtesan in 19th century Paris, keeps pearls and other "tokens of her conquests" in a mother-of-pearl chest. She also at one point comes in from a garden and runs up to her lover with her skirt full of apples. Concludes that in FI, the sequence where this sonnet appears, M introduces "a feminist viewpoint into the English sonnet sequence."
29. Bynner, Witter. "Edna St. Vincent Millay." Prose Pieces. Ed. James Kraft. New York: Farrar, 1978. 182-86.
Reprinted from New Yorker 41 (10 Dec. 1924), Winter Literary Section, 14-15. Discusses and assesses M's poetry from RN to HW. "She has so infused her new spirit into old forms that her stanzas and sonnets seem fresher than all the technical variations of the experimentalists. She has proved that renovation can be innovation." M "is one of the Occidental singers to subdue personal emotions to the larger motion of the earth."
30. - - -. Selected Letters. Ed. James Kraft. New York: Farrar, 1981.
Editorial comment on Bynner's relationship to M. Letters to M and to others from 1920 to 1953 comment on her poems and plays and Bynner's and M's relationship and activities. Includes poems to M by Bynner. Quotes Bynner's journal on visits with M in 1939. Urges Gladys Ficke to write about M since Edmund Wilson and Vincent Sheean have not given her adequate treatment.
31. Caldiero, Frank. "Conversation at Midnight: A Treatise." Tamarack 1 (Sept. 1981): 32-33.
Reprints a letter from Caldiero to Norma Millay from 1973, in which he draws a comparison between Dante's Vita Nuovo and CM. In both the poets exhibit a "mastery of all possible forms, lines, rhythms, etc." M achieves in English "exactly what Dante did in Italian." Sees CM as being, in effect, "a treatise on English prosody."
32. - - -. "The Trial of the Bow." Tamarack 3 (Fall 1985-Winter 1986): 2-7.
Sequel to #31. Compares CM favorably to Dante's Vita Nuovo. Both are experiments in "bending the bow of poetry," to see where the "breaking point" is in the resiliency of meter and form in verse. In particular, M's use of the sonnet in CM is similar to Dante's use of it in Vita Nuovo.
33. Callow, James T., and Robert J. Reilly. "Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)." Guide to American Literature from Emily Dickinson to the Present. New York: Barnes, 1977. 90-91.
Short biography. While M's poetry seemed that of the liberated woman when first published, it now appears traditional in theme and form. Her best work is the short lyric. "She was in fact a remarkable sonneteer, among the finest in all American poetry."
34. Canby, Henry Seidel. "'Stand Back, Pretty Lady.'" Critical Essays on Edna St. Vincent Millay. Thesing. 53-56.
Reprinted from Saturday Review of Literature 3 (19 Mar. 1927): 661. Review of KH as a play. It "belongs to lyric poetry of the timeless order." It is an "intensely feminine play." Only the King is presented as masculine.
35. Chayat, Sherry. "Millay at Vassar: 45 Years Later." Tamarack 1 (Spring 1981): 2-6.
Describes the circumstances leading to the foundation of the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society at Vassar in 1964. Comments on tendency of "male English professors" to "sneer" at mention of M.
36. Cheney, Anne. "Edna St. Vincent Millay in the Village; The Men in Millay's Life. Village Voice 20 (1 Sept. 1975): 41-43.
Excerpt from #37.
37. - - -. Millay in Greenwich Village. Tuscaloosa: The U of Alabama P, 1975.
Deals with "Millay's initiation into maturity as a person and an artist in the Village." Sees the Village experience as the source of her best work. Discusses M's development in terms of her relationships with individual men. To Floyd Dell she owed the clarifying of her attitudes toward women and love, to Edmund Wilson his attempt to gain for her "the critical acclaim she deserved," to Arthur Davison Ficke the form of her poetry and "her mature theme of the permanence of love." Also discussed are Witter Bynner, John Reed, Allan Ross Macdougall, W. Adolphe Roberts, Frank Crowninshield, and Harrison Dowd.
38. Chinoy, Helen Krich. "Art Versus Business: The Role of Women in American Theatre." Drama Review 24 (June 1980): 3-10.
Discusses women's role in the art of theatre. Quotes AC on acting as a career for beautiful but untrained and/or uneducated young women. Abridged from #39.
39. - - -. "Introduction: Art Versus Business; The Role of Women in American Theatre." Women in American Theatre: Careers, Images, Movements. Ed. Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins. New York: Crown, 1981. 1-9.
Cites AC on participation of women in theater. They may have an acting career with qualifications of "feminine attractions."
40. - - -. "Introduction: Art Versus Business: The Role of Women in American Theatre." Women in American Theatre. Ed Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins. Rev. and expanded ed. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1987. 1-9.
Information on M is identical to #39.
41. - - -. "Suppressed Desires: Women in the Theatre." Women, the Arts, and the 1920s in Paris and New York. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1982. 126-32.
Merely mentions M as one of the founders of the Neighborhood Playhouse. No mention of her works.
42. Ciardi, John. "Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Figure of Passionate Living." Thesing. 157-62.
Reprinted from Saturday Review of Literature 33 (Nov. 1950): 446. Overview of M's career as poet. Finds her poetry to represent a pose, not an experience. Her poetry met the needs of young people of the twenties. M and her audience outgrew youthfulness and thus she lost her subject. The social consciousness poems and MBA "are tragic books from which the last vestige of gift has disappeared." M is most alive for her readers "as the creator of her own legend."
43. - - -. "Two Nuns and a Strolling Player." Thesing. 95-96.
Reprinted from Nation 178 (22 May 1954): 446. Review of MH. "When she aspires to the high serious, she is least successful, for what emerges is not the true high serious but only its elocutionary manner."
44. Clampitt, Amy. "Three Cheers for Prettiness." New Republic 206 (6-13 Jan. 1992): 44-46.
Review of SP. M's poetry is not modern in the vein of Marianne Moore, Pound, Eliot, and W.C. Williams (also centenary poets). Unlike them, she is "not puzzling." She "makes no demands on her readers." Rather, a "sensuous freshness [inundates] the formal music of her work with a vigor and a specificity from beyond itself." Finds fault with editor Colin Falck for providing a "sampler" rather than a truly representative selection.
45. Clark, Electa. "Golden Vessel of Great Song (from Sonnet xiii)." Leading Ladies: An Affectionate Look at American Women of the Twentieth Century. New York: Stein, 1976. 107-10.
Brief biography with literary comment. Asserts that M's childhood was "extraordinarily happy" and that because she had many suitors, M could never be charged with "lesbianism." Notes her changeable moods, firm self knowledge, versatility as a writer, reliance on husband, and faith in mankind and its future. Although she was versatile, M's most important works are her sonnets and lyrics. One lifelong theme was conflict between will to die and will to live.
46. Clark, Suzanne. "Jouissance and the Sentimental Daughter: Edna St. Vincent Millay." North Dakota Quarterly (Spring 1986): 85-108.
Offers a psychoanalytical reading of "Renascence," seeing it as "a poem of adolescence." It nevertheless indicates a major issue in M's poetry--"separation and identity." In it M also tries to "deny the place of the woman, or escape it and write from the place of the man, the male subject." There are few "grown-up pleasures" in M's work. Her use of "beloved but old-fashioned conventions" provides a kind of "unpoetic pleasure" for the "otherwise serious reader."
47. - - -. "Jouissance and the Sentimental Daughter: Edna St. Vincent Millay." Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1991. 67-96.
Reprinted from #46.
48. - - -. "The Unwarranted Discourse: Sentimental Community, Modernist Women, and the Case of Millay." Genre 20 (Summer 1987): 133-52.
Examination of women's position in literary modernism with respect to the sentimental. Considers whether there is a female literary tradition in modernism. Comments on J. C. Ransom's infamous essay "The Poet as Woman" in Southern Review 2 (Spring 1937): 783-806. M risked poetry itself by writing for the middle class feminine community. Examines "Tavern" and a poem from FE to see how M worked through "the contradictory demands of modernist art and the appeal to a powerful community of readers."
49. - - -. "The Unwarranted Discourse: Sentimental Community, Modernist Women, and the Case of Millay." Thesing. 248-65.
Reprinted from #48.
50. Collins, Martha. Introduction. Critical Essays on Louise Bogan. Boston: Hall, 1984. 1-23.
Discussion of critical response to Bogan. Notes that M and Bogan were reviewed together in 1955. Bogan's interest in poetic development reflected in her 1939 review of M's work, "Verse" in New Yorker 15 (20 May), 80-82.
51. Comas, Beatrice H. "Maine's Forgotten Poet." Literary Sketches 16x (1976): 8-9.
Short summary of M's achievements on 84th anniversary of her birth. She was a representative figure of her times, a successful writer, a multi-talented woman. Speculates that she lost popularity because she clung to old verse forms.
52. Conroy, Sarah Booth. "The Poet of Rhyme and Reason: Edna St. Vincent Millay, A Centennial Celebration." Washington Post 22 Feb. 1992, sec. D: 1 ff.
Article commemorating one hundredth anniversary of M's birth. Recognizes Millay conference taking place at Skidmore College. Brief biography. Cites M's popularity and her image as that of avant-garde feminist of the 1920s.
53. "Corrections and Clarifications." Chicago Tribune 13 Mar. 1991, sec. 1: 3.
Corrects error regarding quote from M's poetry in art exhibit article. See #132.
54. Costello, Bonnie. "The 'Feminine' Language of Marianne Moore." American Women Poets. Ed. Harold Bloom. The Critical Cosmos Ser. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 117-43.
Reprinted from #55.
55. - - -. "The 'Feminine' Language of Marianne Moore." Women and Language in Literature and Society. Ed. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman. New York: Praeger, 1980. 222-38.
Examination of Moore's "feminine" qualities as displayed in her work. Mentions M and Ransom's article "The Poet as Woman," cited in #48 and quotes from article to show that Ransom admired humility in M's work.
56. Coven, Brenda. "Millay, Edna St. Vincent (1892-1950)." American Women Dramatists of the Twentieth Century: A Bibliography. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1982. 151-53.
Short bibliography of primary and secondary sources.
57. Cowley, Malcolm. "-And I Worked at the Writer's Trade": Chapters of Literary History, 1918-1978. New York: Viking, 1978.
Brief mentions of M in this literary history and inquiry into literary generations and reputations. M writes in the style of a group older than the Lost Generation. M associated with hoax played by Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke in publishing Spectra (1916) under pseudonyms. Notes that she was elected to the National Academy of Arts and Letters. Says her work is transcendental in mood although she was not interested in Transcendentalists.
58. Crane, Joan St. Clair. "Edna St. Vincent Millay's Afterthoughts on the Translation of Baudelaire." Studies in Bibliography 29 (1976): 382-86.
Lists holographic changes M made in a copy of FE given to Allan Ross Macdougall. The alterations offer "evidence that Millay was dissatisfied with certain parts of the translation--both of George Dillon's portion and her own." M's preface to the volume is "an inspired essay."
59. Dame, Enid. "Edna St. Vincent Millay." American Women Writers; A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present. Ed. Lina Mainiero. Vol. 3. New York: Ungar, 1981. 173-76.
Short biography and survey of M's work. Her poetry is interesting for the use of traditional forms to express an emotional intensity. "Millay's use of highly personal material; her fresh, forthright language; and her creation of a strong female persona anticipate modern women's poetry." M will retain a position of importance.
60. - - -. "Edna St. Vincent Millay." American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present. Ed. Langdon Lynne Faust. Abr. ed. Vol. 2. New York: Ungar, 1983. 49-52.
Biography and commentary on M's poetry. Lists qualities that ensure M's position as an important American woman poet. Includes bibliography of works by and about M.
61. - - -. "Edna St. Vincent Millay." American Women Writers; A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present. Ed. Langdon Lynne Faust. Abr. ed. New York: Ungar, 1988. 496-99.
Reprinted from #60.
62. Dasgupta, Gauton. "Millay, Edna St. Vincent." McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama: An International Reference Work in 5 Volumes. Ed. Stanley Hochman. Second ed. Vol. 3. New York: McGraw, 1984. 385.
Identical to #S42.
63. De los Reyes, Marie Philomene. "Edna St. Vincent Millay--Major Sonnet Writer of America." Encounters with English and American Poets. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1976. 50-71.
Written to aid author, who was teaching English in Japan. Compares M's FI to Shakespeare's sonnets and to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. Discusses other M sonnets because her best is not in FI. M did not stress craftsmanship but expression. She is "the first major sonnet writer the New World has nurtured."
64. Deedy, John. "Camden, Maine; Edna St. Vincent Millay." Literary Places: A Guided Pilgrimage: New York and New England. Kansas City: Sheed, 1978. 229-30.
Short biography centering on M's life in Camden. Notes her places of residence in Rockland, Maine, New York City, and Austerlitz, N.Y. Describes the Austerlitz property and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Sees M as a prominent member of the Lost Generation.
65. Dobbs, Jeannine. "Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Tradition of Domestic Poetry." Journal of Women's Studies in Literature 1 (Spring 1979): 89-106.
Short historical review of tradition of domestic poetry followed by a reassessment of M. She was praised by critics for poems treating the "New Women" in a male manner when actually she excelled in domestic poetry. Examines poetry for recurrent themes of relationship between spouses, maternity, preference for nature over housekeeping. Examines "Sonnets From an Ungrafted Tree." Briefly uses M's poetry to place later women poets in a tradition.
66. Dondis, Harold. "The Raising of the Millay Plaque." Tamarack 1 (Spring 1981):7-13.
Recounts the development of the plan to install a plaque on Mount Battie, outside Camden, Maine, to commemorate M's composition of "Renascence." Describes the ceremony at the unveiling of the plaque in June 1968.
67. Dooley, Patricia. Rev. of Ballad of the Harp-Weaver. School Library Journal 37 (1991): 157.
Reviews reprint in an illustrated edition. M's "sure ballad technique balances the poem's sentimentality." Finds the illustrations too literal. They "diminish the symbolic dimension of the ballad." See #11.
68. Douglas, George H. The Smart Magazines: 50 Years of Literary Revelry and High Jinks at Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Life, Esquire, and The Smart Set. Hamden: Archon--Shoe String, 1991.
Names M among poets published by The Smart Set under H. L. Mencken and George Nathan. Brief discussion of Frank Crowninshield's attitude to writers and his help to M, whom he regularly published.
69. - - -. "Edna St. Vincent Millay." Women of the 20s. Dallas: Saybrook, 1986. 109-47.
Biographical treatment of M as a woman who exhibited the temper of the 1920s. M never fit in any milieu as she was a "creature of solitude." Themes in "Renascence" are central to all of M's work. Tells about M's relationship with Arthur Davison Ficke and her time in Europe. Discusses her use of sensuality in her poems, need for isolation, and erratic emotions.
70. "Down East Bookshelf." Down East 26 (Apr. 1980): 116.
Review of "Mayflowers: A Reminiscence," by Norma Millay, a leaflet on Norma's recollections of searching for wildflowers on Mount Battie. Norma identified as Edna's sister. Leaflet includes M's poem "Mayflowers."
71. Drack, Arlene. "Edna St. Vincent Millay's Poems Selected for Young People." Booklist 76 (1 Feb. 1989): 171.
Finds the beauty of the book in "the fine, enduring quality of the poet's verse." Young readers will experience "the full breadth of poetry [as] a friend as well as an entertainer."
72. Drake, William. The First Wave: Women Poets in America. New York: Macmillan, 1987.
Biographical treatment of women poets centers on themes rather than individuals. Discussion, analysis, and comment on M as daughter and family member and in relationships with men, especially her husband. Sees decline of M's reputation as helping remove an atmosphere of success for women after 1930. Discusses Ransom's article "The Poet as Woman," cited in #48.
73. D[unlap], C[arol]. "The Snow Princess: Edna St. Vincent Millay." Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People. Ed. Irving Wallace, Amy Wallace, David Walleschinsky, and Sylvia Wallace. New York: Delacorte, 1981. 199-200.
Brief biography of M, who was "the surrogate man of the family" as a child. Refers to M's "sexual ambivalence." Mentions her affairs with Floyd Dell, Arthur Davison Ficke, and Edmund Wilson. Concludes that her real love was poetry.
74. Eastman, Max. "My Friendship with Edna Millay." Thesing. 163-65.
Reprinted from Max Eastman, Great Companions: Critical Memoirs of Some Famous Friends, 1959. Frank memoir dealing with M's character. Limited reference made to poetry.
75. Eberhart, Richard. "Edna Millay." Tamarack 2 (Winter 1982-1983): 2-4.
Reminiscence of Eberhart's visits to see Norma Millay at M's homestead, Steepletop, and his experience as a college student attending one of M's poetry readings.
76. - - -. Foreword. Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems. Ed. Colin Falck. Centenary Edition. New York: Harper, 1991. xi-xii.
Retells how he visited Steepletop and took two dresses of M's to Washington, D.C., for the Library of Congress and the Museum of American History. Recalls hearing her read poetry at Dartmouth. Notes his awe of M and her poetry. Sees her as a symbol of "Platonic beauty."
77. Eckman, Frederick. "Edna St. Vincent Millay: Notes Toward a Reappraisal." A Question of Quality: Popularity and Value in Modern Creative Writing. Ed. Louis Filler. Bowling Green: Bowling Green S U Popular Press, 1976. 193-203.
Calls for reassessment of M's poetry based on the whole body of her work. Finds all but a few of her critics "useless." Believes M's death and desolation imagery gives her more in common with contemporary poets such as Roethke, Berryman, Plath, and Sexton than with 1920s bohemians, 1930s radicals, or unsophisticated poetry societies. Cites M's lasting popularity based on a few poems, not on a study of the entire CP. Sees her as a literary poet who borrowed from many other poets. Finds in her work an "overwhelming, obsessive concern with death and desolation." Concentrates on "Sonnets From an Ungrafted Tree," which is indebted to Frost.
78. "Edna St. Vincent Millay." American Poets: 1880-1945. First Series. Ed. Peter Quartermain. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 45. Detroit: Gale Research, 1986. 264-76.
Notes M's "continuing willingness to experiment with forms while pursuing favorite themes." Cites critical opinions, some unfavorable but concludes that recent critical and scholarly estimates "may lead to the much needed consideration of her mature work."
79. "Edna St. Vincent Millay Stamp to be Issued July 18." Stamps 196 (4 July 1981): 4.
Announces sale of 18-cent commemorative stamp. A "historical note" describes M's poetry as "reminiscent of the music of older poetic traditions." Brief biographical highlights.
80. Elleman, Barbara. Rev. of Edna St. Vincent Millay, by Carolyn Daffron. Booklist 86 (1 Dec. 1989): 740.
M deserves inclusion in the "American Women of Achievement Series," of which Daffron's book is part, because of her "distinguished contributions to the arts." Will be helpful to student researchers and "insightful for readers of biography."
81. Engle, Paul. "Edna Millay: A Summing-Up of Her Work." Thesing. 97-98.
Reprinted from New York Post 25 Nov. 1956: 11-M. Review of CP. Summary of journalistic criticism. Says the greater the formality of the verse form, the better the M poem. She is one of the great sonnet writers of this century. The more private and personal the subject matter, the better the poem. The archaic vocabulary is "tired" and "outworn."
82. Epstein, David A. "Who Cares What Tripped a Fallen Woman?: Edna St. Vincent Millay: The Unmaking of a Reputation." Diss. Brandeis U. 1993. DAI-A 54/03 (1993): 920.
M's work was "neglected and misinterpreted" because of the use of "modernist criteria along with a split between traditionalists and experimentalists." Further, "the stigma of being an artist and a woman" resulted in "a cheapened level of critical scrutiny." Comments on the "gulf between the unrecognized excellence of the poems and Millay's extant reputation."
83. Erwin, Robert. "The Case of the Missing T-Shirt." The Great Language Panic and Other Essays in Cultural History. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990. 117-29.
Questions why M has not been rediscovered and promoted as a cultural heroine by today's feminist critics. Surveys M's life as a feminist, commenting on her growth as a poet and finds her best work to be her late work. Lists ways in which M worked against herself in terms of her reputation: remoteness from literary community and attacks on Auden, Pound, and Eliot, which made enemies. Changing tastes and publication of two "tame" biographies and her letters hurt her reputation. However most importantly, feminist critics are reluctant to take up her cause because she scorned the type of work they do and they fear for their academic careers.
84. Faber, Harold. "Millay Farm Becoming an Arts Colony." New York Times 20 Feb. 1974: 26.
Interview with Norma Millay on the founding of the Millay Colony for the Arts. She comments on royalties from M's work that had supported her for the previous 24 years.
85. Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: Morrow, 1981.
Discusses LB as a lesbian work. Names M as one who visited the Paris literary salon of Natalie Barney, which was famous as a lesbian rendezvous. Quotes letter of Amy Lowell in1923 saying that M "attempted nothing beyond the personal, which is the hallmark of minor poetry."
86. Fairley, Irene. "Millay in Feminist Perspective: Critical Trends of the 70's." Tamarack 1 (Spring 1981): 288-31.
Summary of feminist criticism in the 1970s, showing the emergence of new perspectives on M's work emanating from women scholars and critics.
87. Falck, Colin. "About the Author." Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems. Centenary Edition. New York: Harper, 1991. xiii-xiv.
Brief biography.
88. - - -. "Introduction: The Modern Lyricism of Edna Millay." Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems. Centenary Edition. New York: Harper, 1991. xv-xxx.
Assesses M in light of modernist tradition and her present neglect, "one of the literary scandals of the twentieth century." While M clung to old traditionalism of form, about 25 percent of her work is "entirely twentieth-century." Explores her themes.
89. Farr, Judith. "Elinor Wylie, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and the Elizabethan Sonnet Tradition." Poetic Traditions of the English Renaissance. Ed. Maynard Mack and George deForest Lord. New Haven: Yale U P, 1982. 287-305.
Compares and contrasts M and Wylie and discusses their decision to write in the Elizabethan manner in FI and "One Person." Summary, analysis, and history of the two works. M's poems owe little to Donne and more to England's Helicon and great sonneteers. Sonnet 30 is characteristic of M's best writing and helps justify her popularity. "M's best work exhibits a tutored sensibility that enabled her to compose effectively within literary traditions she respected."
90. Ferber, Ellen. "The Butler Did It: Recreating Those Literary Masterpieces." Washington Post 22 Mar. 1981, sec. H: 1 ff.
Recipes based on foods mentioned by famous authors in their writings. Cites letter from Vienna in Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay expressing desire for rice and apples. Creates recipe based on those foods, "Apple Rice Millay."
91. Fessenden, Anne. "The Home Forum: Echoes of a Chinese Flute." Christian Science Monitor 5 Feb. 1986: 38.
Quotes M's poem "For Pao-Chin, a Boatman on the Yellow Sea." Author tells about her experiences in China. Norma Millay gave her a tape of Norma reading her sister's poetry before Fessenden went to China. Fessenden comments on "For Pao-Chin," noting M's trip to China, her sensitivity, and her ability to see beauty beyond "garlic and dirt."
92. Ficke, Arthur Davison. "Interview Deluxe with Edna St. Vincent Millay." Thesing. 313-17.
Mock interview written entirely by Ficke, both questions and answers, pertaining mostly to M's appearance and poetry. From a previously unpublished manuscript housed at Yale U. Library.
93. Filler, Louis. "Introduction: Still a Question of Quality." Seasoned Authors for a New Season: The Search for Standards in Popular Writing. A Question of Quality No. 2. Bowling Green: Bowling Green S U Popular Press, 1980. 1-3.
Mentions that M is noted by Frederick Eckman in the first number in this series. Eckman did not entirely endorse M, but upon reviewing her poems "found variations of quality and surprises which he was able to impart." See #77.
94. Fletcher, John Gould. "Sentiment and Anti-Sentiment." Thesing. 49-50.
Reprinted from The Freeman 8 (30 Jan. 1924): 502. Short review of HW. Discusses sentiment and sentimantality. Highly ciritical of the title poem for its intellectual weakness. Two other poets besides M are discussed.
95. "For the Record." Down East 28 (Sept. 1981): 126.
Maine was not chosen for first-day-of-issue ceremonies for the Millay stamp. However, a Camden tribute to M involved readings of her poetry on Mount Battie by residents and visitors including Buckminster Fuller.
96. Fox, Barbara J. "Dip Into a Poem, Please." Christian Science Monitor 28 May 1987: 31.
Editorial on the virtues of learning poetry as a child. Tells how M climbed Mount Battie, wrote "Renascence," and was not elected high school class poet. M was a leading literary figure of the 1920s.
97. Frank, Elizabeth. Louise Bogan: A Portrait. New York: Knopf, 1985.
Brief mentions of M in this literary biography of Bogan. Notes M's influence on Bogan and names M as a communist sympathizer in 1935. Summarizes Bogan's review of WFG in Poetry 45 (Feb. 1935): 277-79.
98. Frank, Elizabeth Perlmutter. "A Doll's Heart: The Girl in the Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Louise Bogan." Thesing. 179-99.
Reprinted from #207 under the name of Elizabeth P. Perlmutter.
99. - - -. "A Doll's Heart: The Girl in the Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Louise Bogan." Critical Essays on Louise Bogan. Ed. Martha Collins. Boston: Hall, 1984. 128-49.
Reprinted from #207 under the name of Elizabeth P. Perlmutter.
100. Fried, Debra. "Andromeda Unbound: Gender and Genre in Millay's Sonnets." Twentieth-Century Literature 32 (Spring 1986): 1-22.
Discusses M favorably as a sonneteer in relation to Wordsworth and Keats. Addresses the most central question in thinking about M: How has the sonnet form's historically implied connection between "formal constraints, e.g., generic, metrical, and rhetorical, and the sexual" influenced M? Suggests that some of M's most effective sonnets "engage in and reflect upon the struggle between the poet and the form as to which will be master."
101. - - -. "Andromeda Unbound: Gender and Genre in Millay's Sonnets." Thesing. 229-47.
Reprinted from #100.
102. - - -. "Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892-1950." Modern American Women Writers. Ed. Elaine Showalter, Lea Baechler, and A. Walton Litz. New York: Scribner's, 1991. 287-302.
Critical and biographical coverage of 41 representative women writers since 1870. Essay surveys M's critical reputation with attention to three issues: "the status and dissemination of Millay's voice, literally and figuratively; the crafting of the individual poem and the arranging of poems into books; and the significance of Millay's status as a woman poet wielding such precise control of poetic form and meter." Includes primary and secondary bibliographies.
103. - - -. "Edna St. Vincent Millay." Modern American Women Writers. Ed. Elaine Showalter, Lea Baechler, and A. Walton Litz. New York: Collier, 1993. 181-95.
Reprinted from #102.
104. Fuller, Henry B. "Dialogues and Spotlights." Thesing. 51-52.Reprinted from New Republic 41 (7 Jan. 1925): 180-81. Review of DD.
"Everything is cleverly done--even here and there with spurts of the inexplicable thing which must be called genius; yet one would be as well pleased if it hadn't been done at all."
105. Gelb, Arthur and Barbara Gelb. "O'Neill!" New York: Harper, 1974.
Reprinted from #S57.
106. Gerhart, Mary. "The Extent and Limits of Metaphor: Reply to Gary Madison." Philosophy Today 21 (Winter 1977): 431-36.
This article comments on "Comments on Reflections on Paul Rincoeur's Philosophy of Metaphor" by G. B. Madison, an article that appears in the same issue of Philosophy Today as Gerhart's article. Gerhart discusses the extent or limits of metaphor. Uses M's sonnet "Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink" to emphasize that metaphor is not everything for Paul Ricoeur, a French author. Quotes entire poem, which may be seen as a comment on metaphor. If so, after the first line, "the remainder of the poem can be understood as restoring the 'extent' of metaphor, once its 'limits' have been accurately sounded."
107. Gilbert, Sandra M. "Female Female Impersonator: Millay and the Theatre of Personality." Thesing. 293-312.
Although posing as the "female fatale" and the "spiritual schoolteacher" respectively, M and Marianne Moore have points in common in the way in which they respond to and reinforce "their own female reification" in their verse and their public personnae. Concludes that both poets elaborated a "feminine assumption that the personal is the poetical," leading to a mode of "female female impersonation" that was "vitally biographical even as it subverted biography by suggesting its artifice." Original to this volume although some portions have appeared in #108.
108. - - -. "Marianne Moore as Female Female Impersonator." Marianne Moore: The Art of a Modernist. Ed. Joseph Parisi. Studies in Modern Literature 109. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1990.
Chronicles M's rise to fame. Searches for correct "matrilineage" for contemporary female poets. Asks if M stands for sentimentality of 19th century while Moore represents intellectual poetry of Emily Dickinson. Compares M's and Moore's work and finds what they had in common. Notes connection between female's body and clothing and the body of her work. Some portions of this article appear in #107.
109. Gould, Jean. American Women Poets: Pioneers of Modern Poetry. New York: Dodd, 1980.
Brief mentions of M in this collection of biographical studies of American women poets. Places M in the lives of Gertrude Stein, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, Marianne Moore, and Louise Bogan.
110. - - -. "Edna St. Vincent Millay." American Women Poets: Pioneers of Modern Poetry. New York: Dodd, 1980. 207-69.
Biography. Relates poems to events in M's life. Notes her dualities of masculine-feminine, intellectual-emotional, militant-reticent. Focuses on M's "inner doubts and fears." Discusses her literary decline and relations with friends and lovers.
111. - - -. "Edna St. Vincent Millay--Saint of the Modern Sonnet." Faith of a (Woman) Writer. Ed. Alice Kessler-Harris and William McBrien. Contributions in Women's Studies series, no. 86. Westport: Greenwood, 1988. 129-42.
Traces events in M's life to reveal origins of individual sonnets and of two sequences, "Fatal Interview" and "Epitaph for the Race of Man." Finds M's modern sonnets to be "her most valuable contribution to twentieth-century poetry."
112. Gray, James. "Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892-1950." American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies. Ed. Leonard Ungar. Vol 3. New York: Scribner's, 1974. 122-44.
Biography, short primary and secondary bibliography. Interprets M's work in light of her main theme--"the search for the integrity of the individual spirit" and the resultant conflicts with death, love, mind, heart, and the petty.
113. Gross, Barry. "Would 25-Cent Press Keep Gatsby in the Public Eye--Or Is the Book Unpopular?" Seasoned Authors For a New Season: The Search for Standards in Popular Writing. A Question of Quality No. 2. Ed. Louis Filler. Bowling Green: Bowling Green S U Popular Press, 1980. 51-57.
Re-evaluation of Gatsby. Cites M's poem about the "'lovely light'" as defining romanticism and sentimentalization of the the post WWI generation. "Lovely light" defines the "lost" of the phrase "lost generation." Also, refers to the fact that few who cited M's poem really knew it.
114. Guereschi, Edward. Rev. of Millay in Greenwich Village, by Anne Cheney. Best Sellers 35 (Dec. 1975). 289-90.
Contains comments on M apart from Cheney's book. Finds M's carefully nurtured legend still alive. Respects "her many bold disguises: as an early liberationist, as a pioneer in that anti-Puritan country of bisexuality, and as a confessional poet burning her candles before the vogue."
115. Hackett, Francis. "Edna St. Vincent Millay." Thesing. 99-102.
Reprinted from New Republic 135 (24 Dec. 1956): 21. Review of CP. Discussion of M's relation to the genteel tradition and of M as a New Englander.
116. "Happy Birthday to Vincent--Millay, of Course." New York Times 15 Mar. 1992, sec. 1: 44.
Description of dramatic presentation of M's poetry at Vassar commemorating the 100th anniversary of her birth. Professor who helped create dramatization said her major theme is death.
117. Harris, Leon. Upton Sinclair: American Rebel. New York: Crowell, 1975.
Briefly identifies M as being married to the widower of the woman Sinclair once loved. Comments on "Justice Denied in Massachusets."
118. Hart, Paula L. "Edna St. Vincent Millay." Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Poets, 1880-1945. Ed. Peter Quartermain. First series. Vol. 45. Detroit: Gale Research, 1986. 264-76.
Literary biography and brief primary and secondary bibliography. M's achievements recognized with a call for a reconsideration of her work.
119. Harting, Emilie C. A Literary Tour Guide to the United States: Northeast. New York: Morrow, 1978.
Discusses M's connections to the Whitehall Inn in Camden, Maine, where she first recited "Renascence" publicly. Describes Steepletop in detail and M's life there. The property is now being converted to the Millay Colony for the Arts. Locates house in Greenwich Village where she lived briefly.
120. Helie, Leonard. One Day in the Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay: Sequence of Mason Sonnets and Other Poems. N.p.: Sheepscot, 1984. N. pag.
Introduction details M's activities on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti. A twelve-poem sonnet sequence follows the happenings of Aug. 22, 1927, "through the eyes, the heart, and the considerable genius of one of America's most sensitive poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay."
121. Henry, Derrick. "Classical Music Notes: Opera with the Power of Poetry Sets Stage for Young Composer." Atlanta Journal and Constitution 25 Nov. 1990: N-8.
Review of Clayton State College performance of Brent Weaver's opera Aria da Capo, a transformation of M's play by the same name. Says M's AC is an "absurdist morality play." The opera mirrors and enhances the play which is "fast-paced, with rapid mood shifts and a pungent blend of laughter and tears." M achieves power by treating serious subject lightly.
122. Hill, Archibald A. "Rhymes and Reasons: The Practice of Two Poets." Language Form and Linguistic Variation: Papers Dedicated to Angus McIntosh. Ed. John Anderson. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, Series IV: Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1982. 169-86.
Technical paper on general principles of rhyme and its relation to poems in which it appears. Evaluates rhymes in "Renascence." Surveys and evaluates M's rhyme in her lyric poetry focusing on "The Harp-Weaver" and "Counting-out Rhyme." Concludes that M "had an extremely keen and delicate ear, but that she did not always bother to listen."
123. Hill, Frank Ernest. "Edna St. Vincent Millay." Thesing. 35-36.
Reprinted from The Measure no. 1 (Mar. 1921): 25-26. Review of FFT. Discusses the dramatic quality of M's verse. Emotions are displayed through actions. Concern for the dramatic has made meter unimportant. This explains the use of conventional forms by an individualist. Her dramatic sense has affected her diction "making it vehicular only." "She never uses a revealing adjective; she prefers the revealing gesture."
124. Hirsch, Jerrold. "Ludwig Lewisohn: Can He Still Help Us? A Reconsideration of Expression in America." Seasoned Authors For a New Season: The Search for Standards in Popular Writing. A Question of Quality No. 2. Ed. Louis Filler. Bowling Green: Bowling Green S U Popular Press, 1980. 98-116.
Lewisohn's best criticism was often found in his treatment of poetry. He was perceptive about M, a poet whose reputation has declined. He praised her sonnets, saw their connection to Shakespeare's sonnets, and noted her poems about death. Connected her light-hearted poems with those about death. Saw her as a sorrowful pagan.
125. - - -. Backgrounds of American Literary Thought. 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974.
Identical to #S71.
126. Hux, Samuel. "On the Politics of Manners." North American Mentor 16 (Summer 1978): 37-44.
Uses lines from "On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven" and "Dirge without Music" in a discussion of the nature of manners. Says M was "insistent on being a lady in an old-fashioned way no matter how sexually liberated." She "did not have to assert how 'free' she was because she was certain of her worth."
127. Jack, Peter Monro. "Conversations of Our Time: Edna St. Vincent Millay's Tapestry of Contemporary Themes." Thesing 73-76.
Reprinted from New York Times Book Review 25 July 1937:1 ff. Review of CM. Conversation moves with a sense of purpose. Notes that M does not include a scientist or philosopher who could settle the argument definitely. "It is the variety that counts, the dramatic interplay of contemporary opinion." Praises the book for being free of M's egotism. Like the work of Pound and Eliot, M has given up the "personal dictatorship of the lyric" to give poetry a meaning beyond the pleasure it conveys.
128. Jane, Mary C. "Nourished on the 'mountain's flinty bread.'" Down East 28 (Feb. 1982): 13-15.
Feature story on 100th birthday of Abbie Huston Evans. Names M as her "contemporary and friend." Quotes unnamed work by M addressed to Evans.
129. Johnson, Ronald. "Six, Alas!" Chicago Review 37 (Winter 1990): 26-41.
Author "toasts" six women writers currently out of fashion. M, who achieved "rock-star status," is unlike other acclaimed poets in the extent of her eclipse. Compares M to others of her contemporaries. She is greater than both Sara Teasdale and Elinor Wylie and is comparable to Robert Frost in that both were populist poets. Some of her work is better than much of Keats and Shelley.
130. Jones, Phyllis M. "Amatory Sonnet Sequences and the Female Perspective of Elinor Wylie and Edna St. Vincent Millay." Women's Studies 10 (1981): 41-61.
"Feminist critics have hardly examined women's love poetry" as in, for example, FI and Wylie's One Person, two amatory sonnet sequences. Both M and Wylie imply that the poetry of love from the male point of view has been "incomplete, unrealistic, or absurd about the nature of love and especially the nature of woman as lover."
131. Keys, Kay Elaine. "Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Descriptive Bibliography." Diss. U of Texas at Austin, 1978. DAI-A 39/04 (1978): 2274.
Exhaustive listing and/or description of every appearance of M's work in print. Includes items reprinted in school textbooks as well as work translated into other languages, set to music, or recorded.
132. Kilian, Michael. "Village Vanguard." Chicago Tribune 12 Mar. 1991, sec. 5: 1 ff.
Discussion of Greenwich Village's importance to American history as a "bohemian enclave" and notice of art show at Museum of the City of New York. M and others transformed their lives by going to the Village. M was the "undisputable golden girl of the Village." She "utterly mesmerized the menfolk of the community in the teens and '20s." See #53 for corrections to this article.
133. Kisch, Arnold I. The Romantic Ghost of Greenwich Village: Guido Bruno in his Garret. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1976.
Tells how Charles Edison, an associate of Bruno, and his fiancee Carolyn Hawkins accompanied M to Romany Marie's restaurant in Greenwich Village. Upon entering, M was suddenly inspired to write her quatrain "First Fig."
134. Klemans, Patricia A. "'Being Born a Woman': A New Look at Edna St. Vincent Millay." Colby Library Quarterly 15 (Mar. 1979): 7-18.
M, writing from the liberated woman's point of view, made a unique contribution to literature best illustrated by FI. Contemporary critics missed the innovative aspects of the work because it was not written in the T. S. Eliot mode. The persona of the sequence "is a new personality in love poetry," the passionate woman. Explicates and analyzes M's mythic structure, link with Donne, and nature imagery. Within the traditional form, M is a unique "woman who is initiator, aggressor, and controller as well as victim, sufferer, and survivor." Calls for reassessment of M.
135. - - -. "'Being Born a Woman': A New Look at Edna St. Vincent Millay." Thesing 200-12.
Reprinted from #134.
136. Klockner, Karen M. Rev. of Poems Selected for Young People. Horn Book Magazine 56 (Feb. 1980): 81.
Merely descriptive of the contents of the volume. No attempt at criticism is made.
137. Kupferberg, Tuli, and Syvia Topp. "Child Geniuses." Saturday Evening Post 250 (Oct. 1978): 54-56 ff.
Reprints letter from M to her mother in November 1900 (M then age 8) including words to a poem she wrote about Thanksgiving. Also reprints "Vacation Song," written at age 15.
138. Lacey, Linda J. "Of Bread, Roses and Copyrights." Duke Law Journal (Dec. 1989): 1532-96.
Uses M's poem "The Concert" to illustrate author's contention that the language of economic theory cannot easily be used to explain art.
139. Larabee, Anne. "First-Wave Feminist Theatre: 1890-1930." Diss. SUNY Binghamton, 1989. DAI-A 49/08 (1989): 2426.
Explores "women's use of theatre in the first-wave feminist struggle for personal and political freedom." Women "staged themselves in radical ways" and thus questioned "not only the image of the American Woman but the language of aesthetics." M receives attention as well as Djuna Barnes, Susan Glaspell, Anita Bonner, and Angelina Weld Griske.
140. Levay, John. "Millay's 'Let You Not Say.'" Explicator 45 (Winter 1987): 50-52.
The puzzling references in lines 6-8 of the poem to a "superstition" might refer to the White Goddess (so named by Robert Bridges) and the "weightless tales" to such figures as Tristan, Launcelot, Adonis, and Tithonus, who "may come and go, but the Woman (like Tennyson's brook) goes on forever."
141. Libera, Sharon Mayer. "Maine Remembered." Parnassus 5 (Fall-Winter 1976): 200-12.
Review of 1975 reprint of CP. Notes M's continuing popularity despite her inability to comprehend the 20th century "aesthetic revolution." She "limited herself by a rigid conception of high art." Libera tries to account for M's continuing popularity with readers if not with university teachers. M's lifelong theme was "the struggle between forces of death and life." M's Maine childhood accounts for many of her nature images. SA with its "bittersweet nostalgia of the sophisticate for the things of the earth" "suggests her failure to adjust to the frenzied life of which she was outwardly the symbol." Her poetic decline after 1939 is characterized by lack of control over her work.
142. Limmer, Ruth. "Circumscriptions." Critical Essays on Louise Bogan. Ed. Martha Collins. Boston: Hall, 1984. 166-74.
Original to this volume, this essay examines Bogan's "unknown" status at her death. Contrasts Bogan's and M's public presentation of themselves in poetry readings. M created a "vivid persona." Bogan was detached from the audience and from the poetry.
143. Lowell, Amy. A Critical Fable. Boston: Houghton, 1922.
Reprinted from #S79.
144. - - -. A Critical Fable. New York: AMS, 1981.
Reprinted from #143.
145. MacDonald, Ruth K. Rev. of Poems Selected for Young People. School Library Journal 26 (Oct. 1979): 143.
Review of 1979 reprint. Critical of choice of poems and their grouping into six parts (as in the original edition). Finds "no clear reason" for either. A volume of M's collected poems would be "a better investment."
146. MacKay, Carol Hanberg. "The Letter-Writer and the Text in Martin Chuzzlewit." Studies in English Literature 26 (Autumn 1986): 737-58.
Quotes M's "The Poet and His Book" as introduction to a study of the presentation and function of letters in novel by Dickens.
147. Manly, John Matthews and Edith Rickert. Contemporary American Literature; Bibliographies and Study Outlines. Rev. by Fred B. Millett. New York: Haskell, 1974.
Reprinted from #S84.
148. Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked. Chicago: ALA, 1975.
In discussion of Rene Taupin's view of Williams as expressed in his 1929 book L'influence du symbolisme Francaise sur la Poesie Americaine (1910-1920), Paris: H. Champion, Williams notes that like Pound, Taupin dismissed the "English" tradition of poetry as respresented by M.
149. "Marianne Moore: The Art of a Modernist Master: A Symposium." Marianne Moore: The Art of a Modernist. Ed. Joseph Parisi. Studies in Modern Literature 109. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1990. 105-23.
Quotes from a panel discussion among David Bromwich, Sandra Gilbert, John Hollander, Alicia Ostriker, and Robert Pinsky. Emphasizes M's and Moore's adoption of roles as costumes. Contrasts M and Moore in their treatment of sexuality and as public figures. Moore created her audience; M used one already there. Notes decline of M's reputation in 1940s.
150. Martin, W. ". . . And Now to Introduce Edna St. Vincent Millay." Iowa Review 22 (Fall 1992): 210-14.
Rev. of SP. Calls the volume "a very good introduction to Millay's work." Finds that Falck's introductory essay "does not succeed in doing Millay any favors." Its "belligerent tone" works against the "real purpose of the book," i.e. "to reintroduce [Millay] to a contemporary audience."
151. Mattson, Francis O. Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: New York Public Library, 1991.
Pamphlet to accompany New York Public Library exhibition of Millay memorabilia commemorating her 100th birthday.
152. McGill, Ralph E[merson]. The South and the Southerner. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1992.
Reprinted from #S90.
153. McGraw, John G. "God and the Problem of Loneliness." Religious Studies 28 (Sept. 1992): 319-46.
Provides a taxonomy of 10 kinds of human loneliness and indicates how God is the answer to each. In section on cosmic loneliness, author names M and quotes CM on the personification of cosmic loneliness.
154. McLuhan, Herbert Marshall. "The New York Wits." Thesing 154-56.Excerpted from Kenyon Review 7 (Winter 1945): 12-28.
Discusses the relationship of popular culture to society and to serious art and serious criticism. Sees M as "a purveyor of cliche sentiment." She has "no discernible sensibility of her own."
155. Merriam, Carol U. "Another Great Escape: Propertius 3.21 and Edna St. Vincent Millay's 'Intention to Escape from Him.'" Classical and Modern Literature 2 (Winter 1991): 181-84.
M and Sextus Propertius have many themes in common in their love poetry. Similarities between M and Latin poets are not a coincidence as M loved the classics and was probably influenced at Vassar by Elizabeth Hazelton Haight, a Latin scholar. Compares and contrasts M's "Intention to Escape from Him" and Propertius's Elegy 3.21
156. Middlebrook, Diane Wood. "The Problem of the Woman Artist: Louise Bogan, 'The Alchemist.'" Critical Essays on Louise Bogan. Ed. Martha Collins. Boston: Hall, 1984. 174-80.
Lists M among Bogan's contemporaries and peers who were "impeccable stylist[s]" aware that women poets must work within the boundaries given to them as women. These women remained on the edge of the poetic renaissance of the early 20th century.
157. - - -. "The Problem of the Woman Artist: Louise Bogan, 'The Alchemist.'" American Women Poets. Ed. Harold Bloom. Critical Cosmos ser. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 145-50.
Reprinted from #156.
158. "Millay, Edna St. Vincent." American Cultural Leaders from Colonial Times to the Present. Ed. Amy Lewis and Paula McGuire. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1993. 333.
Mostly a biographical compilation. M "wrote spirited verses in traditional forms, especially the sonnet." Finds her lyrics to be "both immediate and universal."
159. "Millay, Edna St. Vincent." American Women 1935-1940: A Composite Biographical Dictionary. Ed. Durwood Howes. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1981. 615.
Brief biography. Gives parentage, education, publications, and honors.
160. "Millay, Edna St. Vincent." The Continum Dictionary of Women's Biography. Ed. Jennifer S. Uglow. New Expanded Edition. New York: Continum, 1989. 377-78.
Short biography.
161. "Millay, Edna St. Vincent." Major 20th-Century Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors. Ed. Bryan Ryan. Vol. 3. Detroit: Gale, 1991. 2046-51.
Lengthy biography plus primary and secondary bibliographies.
162. Rev. of Millay in Greenwich Village, by Anne Cheney. Booklist 22 (1 Dec. 1985): 490.
Calls Cheney's book "exemplary biography," affording "special insights into the poems of that period."
163. Rev. of Millay in Greenwich Village, by Anne Cheney. Choice 12 (Jan. 1976): 1442.
Sees M as "sensational but minor 20th-century American poet." No doubt that M "personifies post-World War I Village Bohemianism, Free Love, Art for Art's Sake, and Carpe Diem."
164. Rev. of Millay in Greenwich Village, by Anne Cheney. Kirkus Reviews 43 (1 Aug. 1975): 884.
Summarizes book. M wrote her best poetry between 1918 and 1925. Notes "the long diminuendo following her marriage to Eugen Boissevain."
165. Millay, Norma. "How Edna St. Vincent Millay Got Her Name." New York Times Book Review, 24 July 1983: 21.
Letter to the editor explaining that M's middle name was taken from the hospital in NYC, where an uncle made an almost miraculous recovery from the effects of inadvertently stowing away on a freighter. M's mother chose the name in gratitude.
166. - - -. Introduction. Collected Sonnets. Rev. and expanded ed. New York: Harper, 1988. xxi-xxiv.
Describes some variations M used in the form of the sonnet, such as an alexandrine final line, iambic tetrameter, and the use of 13 lines in two sonnets which were not published until after her death.
167. - - -. "Mayflowers: A Reminiscence." Tamarack 1 (Spring 1981): 16-20.
Recounts Norma Millay's various encounters with mayflowers in her childhood in Maine. Comments on M's poem "Who Will Go A-Maying?" reprinted on an adjacent page. M set it to music and sang it at a recital at the Whitehall Inn in Camden on the night she was "discovered."
168. - - -. "The Saga of Conversation at Midnight in the Living Theatre." Tamarack 3 (Fall 1985-Winter 1986): 36-58.
Describes the problems encountered by Norma Millay, M's executor, in dealing with those who tried to stage CM in three productions in 1957, 1961, and 1964. After the successful 1961 production in Hollywood the same production closed after four days in NYC. Both Walter Kerr's review of it and Norma Millay's rebuttal are reprinted here.
169. - - -. "Scholarly Surmise: I'm Still Here." Tamarack 2 (Winter 1982-1983): 25-30.
Takes to task Robert Karoly Sarlos for inaccuracies about M's private life in his book Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players (see #234) and John Frederick Nims in his biographical note on M in the Harper Anthology of Poetry (see #187). Disputes comments made by both about the private lives of both herself and M.
170. Miller, Lillian B. Rev. of Millay in Greenwich Village. History; Reviews of New Books 4 (Mar. 1976): 101-102.
Cheney's book is superficial. Most important influences on M were social radicalism and Freudianism, which affected her lifestyle but not her poetry. M's insecurity, evidenced by her many lovers, kept her using "historically-accepted poetic modes and stylistic devices."
171. Miller, Nina. "Love Poetry and the Woman: Literary Negotiations in Edna St. Vincent Millay, Genevieve Taggard, and Dorothy Parker." Diss Northwestern U, 1991. DAI 52/12 (1992): 4331A.
Describes the "phenomenon of the New Woman" and the "peculiar position of the woman love poet as a public embodiment of femininity." M forged her poetics in the context of "the special license and contradictions of her subcultural role," i.e., as a member of "Greenwich Village bohemia." M seen as figurehead of that subculture.
172. Millett, Fred B. "Introduction to Contemporary American Literature." Contemporary American Literature: Bibliographies and Study Outlines, by John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert. Rev. by Fred B. Millett. New York: Haskell House, 1974. 3-98.
Reprinted from #S94.
173. Minot, Walter S. "Millay's Ungrafted Tree: The Problem of the Artist as Woman." New England Quarterly 48 (June 1975): 260-68.
Psychoanalytical approach to M, who is used as an example of why American women fail to become major poets. Sees "Sonnets From an Ungrafted Tree" as symbolic murder of her father. M's relationship with her father has not been fully appreciated. His absence developed in her a distrust of men, uncertainty of sexual roles, and excessive attachment to her mother. The strain of being independent and sexually free contributed to her emotional, physical, and professional degeneration. This "high price seems to be one that women have had to pay if they wanted to be poets in our society."
174. Mizejewski, Linda. Rev. of Edna St. Vincent Millay, rev. ed., by Norman A. Brittin. American Notes and Queries 22 (Nov.-Dec. 1983): 56-7.
M is a "problematic poet" because her abilities were not realized and her accomplishments have been obscured by myths. She suffered from literary politics and tyrannies of anthologists. Brittin's new edition reevaluates M in light of new literary politics and feminist criticism and sees her outside the "Eliot-Pound influence." Notes importance of her minor work, i.e., her dramas and short stories.
175. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. New York: Doubleday, 1976.
Very brief mentions in this study of women's literature. Names M as a poet who wrote of love using fire imagery. Lists some poems in "Notes" section.
176. Molesworth, Charles. Marianne Moore: A Literary Life. New York: Athenaeum, 1990.
Briefly contrasts M and Moore when they both lived in Greenwich Village after WWI. Quotes one of Moore's very rare references to M, whom she describes as being in "a rather glamorous stratum of Village society."
177. Monroe, Harriet. "Comment: Edna St. Vincent Millay." Thesing 133-36.
Reprinted from Poetry 24 (Aug,. 1924): 12. Compares M with E. Bronte, E. B. Browning, C. Rossetti, and E. Dickinson and suggests that she is greatest woman poet since Sappho. Mentions AC and discusses lyrics and sonnets.
178. - - -. "First Books of Verse." Thesing. 33-34.
Reprinted from Poetry 13 (Dec. 1918): 167-68. Review of RN, which is seen as representing achievement rather than promise.
179. Montefiore, Jan. "Romantic Transcendence: Edna St [sic.] Vincent Millay." Feminism and Poetry: Language, Experience, Identity in Women's Writing. London: Pandora, 1987. 114-25 ff.
Analyzes M's love poems focusing on sonnets in FI. They adhere to tradition and are committed to romantic love. Sonnets do not define identity of poet through presence of lover. Brief comparison of M's and Christina Rossetti's sonnets.
180. Morris, Willie. New York Days. Boston: Little, 1993.
Morris' memoirs. After his arrival in New York City in 1962, he sought out places associated with his literary heroes, one of whom was M.
181. Rev. of The Murder of Lidice. Thesing 89.
Reprinted from Theatre Arts 26 (Dec. 1942): 733. Concerned with radio performance. Claims that "as broadcast drama the poem was entirely successful."
182. Murphy, Patrick D. "The Verse Novel: A Modern American Poetic Genre." College English 51 (Jan. 1989): 57-72.
CM, a verse drama, differs from a verse novel in that it "establishes a contract based on the norms of theatre drama." M makes this distinction clear in the introduction to CM.
183. Myers, Lisa R. "Embodied Voices: Public and Private: Self-Presentation in Modern Poetry." Diss. U of Pennsylvania, 1993. DAI 153/11 (1993): 3911A.
Examines the public performance of lyric poetry as "a point of intersection between public and private discourse," requiring perhaps "a new mode of biocritical inquiry." Radio and phonograph records allow poets' voices to circulate "separate from their bodies." This is "modernist self-fashioning," and M is the "most positive example" of it.
184. Nash, Charles C. "Bunny and Vincent: Images of Edna St. Vincent Millay in the Fiction of Edmund Wilson." Publications of the Missouri Philological Association 10 (1985): 21-27.
Wilson was initially fascinated by M but then alienated by her "extreme promiscuity" and bohemian lifestyle in Greenwich Village. She was the model for two characters in his fictional works: Rita, in I Thought of Daisy, and Ellen, in Memoirs of Hecate County.
185. Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989.
Scattered references to M place her in the historical milieu covered by this book. M is now seen from a feminist perspective rather than as a romantic figure. History and summary of ML, a work which raises issues about public function of poetry in time of social crisis. CM considered part of a continuing political dialogue in the form of poetry. All poets who are repeatedly read are subjected to contradictory analysis. Thus M is seen as "rhapsodic, swooning" and "politically committed." Quotes Ransom's "notorious comments on women" in his article on women poets, cited in #48.
186. Nierman, Judith. Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Reference Guide. Boston: Hall, 1977.
Major comprehensive annotated bibliography of secondary sources on M 1918-1973.
187. Nims, John Frederick. "Edna St. Vincent Millay." Harper Anthology of Poetry. New York: Harper, 1981. 586.
Very brief. Characterizes M as "an early example of the liberated woman," one who wrote of her "amours." See #169 for comment.
188. "Norma Millay." Variety 323 (11 June 1986): 94.
Obituary. Tells of Norma Millay's activities as an actress, editor, and M's literary executor. Notes that of 72 plays presented at Provinceton Playhouse in NYC in 1917-1921 and 1924, M and her "acting family" appeared in 34.
189. "Notes on Current Books." Virginia Quarterly Review 52 (Autumn 1976): 112.
Very brief unfavorable review of Millay in Greenwich Village, by Anne Cheney. Finds the narrative "disjointed and maundering."
190. O'Connor, Margaret Anne. Rev. of Millay in Greenwich Village, by Anne Cheney. Library Journal 100 (Dec. 1975): 2318.
Starts out strong in placing M in Village milieu, but focus on M and her Village period disappears altogether in later chapters. The "psychological portrait" of M early in her career promised by Cheney does not clearly emerge.
191. Olson, Elder. "Louise Bogan and Leonie Adams." Critical Essays on Louise Bogan. Ed. Martha Collins. Boston: Hall, 1984. 71-84.
Reprinted from #S101.
192. Olson, Ray. Rev. of Selected Poems. Centenary Edition, ed. Colin Falck. Booklist 88 (1 Oct. 1991): 235.
New edition of M's poems shows why she was once considered a major American poet and why today's readers ought to reassess her. When she does say something "worth hearing," she says it so memorably "that her stature as a major-minor American poet is indisputable."
193. Orel, Harold. "Tarnished Arrows: The Last Phase of Edna St. Vincent Millay." Thesing. 166-73.
Reprinted from Kansas Magazine 1 (1960): 73-38. Attempts to explain the inferior poetry which M produced at the end of her career. Sees CM as an endeavor to find new subject matter and form. The search for a new style combined with her patriotism produced poor work in MBA and elsewhere and proved to be her ruin as a creative artist.
194. Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America. Boston: Beacon, 1986.
Study of "tide of poetry" by contemporary American women. In survey of past poetry, M appears as one of a group of women whose style was "artificially self-conscious, highly crafted, and musical," characterized by clarity and irony, and comprising "the first substantial body of lyric poetry which is worth anything in the United States." Comments on Ransom's essay cited in #48. Notes M's political poetry. Comments on "Renascence" and "An Ancient Gesture."
195. Ostriker, Alicia. "The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking." Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Diane Wood Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom. Women and Culture ser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1985. 10-36.
Study of definition of female self in recent poetry. Briefly compares scream in "Renascence" to that of Keats' Apollo. "Renascence" is "about the genesis of a poet."
196. "Outstanding Collection of the First Woman to Win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry." Book-of-the-Month Club News Jan 1991: 21.
Very brief notice. M's poems "have a vitality and an accessibility that makes reading them a pure, clear pleasure."
197. Patton, J[ohn] J. Rev. of Collectd Sonnets. Rev. and expanded ed. Choice 26 (Sept. 1988): 118.
Contains 20 sonnets that did not appear in the original 1941 edition. M is a sonneteer "unequalled in American literature" and "one of the major writers of sonnets in English," easily bearing comparison with Keats.
198. - - -. Rev. of Edna St. Vincent Millay: a Reference Guide, by Judith Nierman. Choice 15 (May 1978): 51.
Nierman's work goes "far beyond any other bibliography" on M, containing as it does over 1000 items. "Indispensable" to Millay scholarship. See #186.
199. - - -. Rev. of Star in the Shed Window: Collected Poems, by James Hayford. Choice 27 (July/Aug. 1990): 159.
M cited as one of the New England poets, along with Maxine Kumin and Emily Dickinson, to whom Hayford has a closer affinity in diction and versification than to Frost, his mentor and friend.
200. Patton, John J. "A Definitive Guide to Millay Studies: A Review." Tamarack 1 (Spring 1981): 34-35.
Considers Judith Nierman's Reference Guide to M as superseding all previously published bibliographies. Fills "a serious gap" in Millay studies. See #186.
201. - - -. "Edna St. Vincent Millay: Woman, Artist, Humanist." Tamarack 2 (Winter 1982-83): 32-35.
Shows a side of M as an activist in many causes. Details her achievements as dramatist, poet, prose writer, and translator. Describes M as "an exacting and scrupulous craftsman in her art."
202. - - -. "The Variety of Language in Millay's Verse Plays." Tamarack 3 (Fall 1985-Winter 1986): 8-16.
Illustrates M's adaptation of verse diction suitable to each of her dramas. As an experienced actress she kept in mind the dramatic effectiveness of the choice of language. Thinks she is most versatile in CM.
203. Peary, Linda. "A Bibliography of Provincetown Players' Dramas, 1915-1922." Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 69 (Fourth Quarter 1975): 569-74.
Lists sources for published and unpublished plays performed by Provincetown Players. Includes plays performed but for which no source exists. Includes AC and PMP.
204. Peppe, Holly L. "Rewriting the Myth of the Woman in Love: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Her Critics and Her Sonnets." Diss. U of New Hampshire, 1987. DAI-A 49/03 (1988): 505.
M is seen as "a spokesperson for a new feminine consciousness in America during the first half of the century." Her shift from early feminine to later masculine themes caused her "critical fall from grace." M changed from "domestic, natural, and confinement imagery" in FI to a rewriting of "traditional male love poetry conventions and sexual protocol in order to include female experience" in "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree." M seen as "precursor to contemporary American women poets."
205. Perkins, David. From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode. Vol. 1. A History of Modern Poetry. Cambridge: Belknap P--Harvard U P, 1976.
M's poems should not be confused with those in the Genteel mode. She was among the most important of traditionalist poets. Surveys her poetry, which offered the style and content that Americans expected of poetry before Modernism. Relates M to Arthur Davison Ficke and Elinor Wylie.
206. - - -. Modernism and After. Vol. 2. A History of Modern Poetry. Cambridge: Belknap P--Harvard U P, 1987.
M listed among classic poets who will be remembered. Places her in avant garde New York of 1920s. M may have influenced e. e. cummings.
207. Perlmutter, Elizabeth P. "Doll's Heart: The Girl in the Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Louise Bogan." Twentieth Century Literature 23 (May 1977): 157-79.
Compares the female personae developed by M and Bogan. "Millay's actual achievement, which was not inconsiderable, was to conserve . . . the melodic simplicity of the combined pastoral and personal lyric by breathing into it a hybridized diction we must ruefully call 'poetic.'" M's persona of the Girl was a theatrical medium for the "expression of sudden shifts in tone and implied gestures." Bogan's Girl began in imitation of M's but developed into a persona who subordinated "her personality and experience to the discipline of language itself." Reprinted in #98 and #99.
208. Perron, Lee. "Poetry As An Oral Art; Teaching a Poetic." American Poetry Review 4 (Jan.-Feb. 1975): 11-12.
Suggestions from a poet on how to teach poetry. Quotes M's poem "Counting Out Rhyme" as example of a difficult poem in simple language.
209. Pettit, Rhonda. Rev. of Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets, by Cheryl Walker. Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 12 (Fall 1993): 363-66.
Associates M with her sonnets. Mask of "bodily spirit" assumed by M failed. Mask enabled poet to "explore issues relating to women and power" but "limit[ed] the poet's ability to envision alternative scripts." Notes M's "flapper image," which she "sold."
210. Phillips, David E. "Down East Bookshelf." Down East 29 (Aug. 1982): 186.
Review of Down East Books reprint of original Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Comments on M's reluctance to discuss her published work. Cites her "self-critical spirit, her intelligence, her literary taste, and her great generosity to others."
211. Rev. of Poems Selected for Young People, by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Instructor 89 (Nov. 1989): 142.
Very brief notice remarking on M's "fresh and vital style."
212. Preston, John Hyde. "Edna St. Vincent Millay." Thesing. 143-53.Reprinted from Virginia Quarterly Review 3 (July 1927): 342-55. Criticism of M's work.
Stresses her individuality and the boldness of her love poems. Praises KH and narrates the plot.
213. Preston, Keith. "The Periscope." Chicago Daily News 21 Dec. 1921: 12.
Includes brief paragraph on M's benefactress preferring Vassar to Smith. M has graduated from Vassar.
214. Rev. of The Princess Marries the Page. Thesing. 65.
Reprinted from London Times Literary Supplement 29 Dec. 1932: 990. Short, non-critical description and plot summary.
215. Pulley, Joanne Veatch. "Out of Reach of the Baby, the Artist, and Society: Millay's Fiction and Feminism." Thesing. 273-86.
Original to this volume. Several pieces of M's short fiction deal allegorically with the condition of the artist in America, especially the woman artist, and show the unhappy fate of artists who give in to the pressures of society. The only alternative seems to be a self-protective flight from social conventions. Claims that M went abroad in the 1920s in order to avoid the situations described in her stories.
216. Reeves, Charles Eric. "The Language of Convention: Literature and Consensus." Poetics Today 7 (1986): 3-28.
Essay to develop a language for a theory of literary convention. Quotes Allen Tate on M's FI as using Elizabethan conventions but being at same time "un-traditional." Conventions of past have dictated the language such that the language is not related to modern understanding. Tate has tried to distinguish between convention and tradition in literature. See #S141.
217. Reimer, Margaret R. "Putting Chaos into Fourteen Lines: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Her Sonnets, Her Critics, and Modernism." Diss. U of Alaska, Anchorage, 1991. MAI 30/01 (1992): 27.
M wrote during the Modern period but in the alternative tradition of feminine poetry. Her "deliberate choice to avoid Modernist poetics" has been misunderstood by critics, especially other poets. Comments on MH as illustrating M's poetics in contrast to the Modernist poetics as defined by Pound and Eliot. One of her strengths is "[her] ability to evoke primary experience in her audience."
218. Rich, Adrienne. "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision." On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York: Norton, 1979. 33-49.
Reprinted from #S114.
219. Rich, Maria F. "Opera USA-Perspective: American Opera After the Bicentennial." Opera Quarterly 1 (1983): 90-113.
Mentions that 9 operas inspired by AC are among operas based on American literature and produced in the recent past. Does not provide titles or production data.
220. Ripple, Paula. "Saying Yes to Life: Saying Yes to Relationships." Studies in Formative Spirituality 6 (Nov. 1985): 387-97.
Uses M's sonnet "Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink" and unnamed lines from CP to illustrate the importance of love and human relationships and the suffering that results from change.
221. Robe, Lucy Barry. Co-Starring Famous Women and Alcohol. Minneapolis: CompCare, 1986.
Names M as "drinking buddy" of Libby Holman, an alcoholic heroine of Dorothy Parker, an ethnic Irish alcoholic, an alcoholic daughter of divorced parents, the young wife of an older husband who facilitated her drinking, and a heavy-drinking expatriate in Paris in the 1920s.
222. Robins, Natalie. Alien Ink: The FBI's War on Freedom of Expression. New York: Morrow, 1992.
Tells how FBI began file on M in 1923 after finding her name among those entered in contest sponsored by Friends of Soviet Russia. Briefly describes contents of 94-page file. Says J. Edgar Hoover received gift of recording of Ronald Coleman reading M's "Poem and Prayer for an Invading Army."
223. - - -. "Hoover and American Lit: The Defiling of Writers." Nation 245 (10 Oct. 1987): 367-72.
Report of author's investigation under the Freedom of Information Act of FBI files on American authors, one of whom was M. M's file is 94 pages in length, begun in 1924 when FBI agents found her name among those entered in a contest to win a free trip to Russia. M's metaphors were suspect as was a greeting card with one of her poems printed on it.
224. - - -. "The Secret War Against American Writers." Esquire, 117 (Mar. 1992): 106-109 ff.
Brief mention of M as an American writer on whom the FBI maintained a file because of her "suspicious" activities. Adapted from #222.
225. Rosenberg, Liz. "So Young, So Good, So Popular." New York Times Book Review 15 Mar. 1992: 3.
Rev. of SP. Praises Colin Falck's introduction. Poems selected refute the idea that M wrote only light or frivolous verse or that she wrote only about "women's subjects." This collection represents "another renascence" in M's reputation.
226. Rosenfeld, Paul. "Under Angry Constellations." Thesing. 83-85.Reprinted from Poetry 55 (Oct. 1939): 47-50.
Rev. of HWQ. Finds no lessening of M's poetic powers. Criticizes political poems. Commentary on other individual poems.
227. Rosenstone, Robert A. Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed. New York: Knopf, 1975.
Identifies M as Greenwich Village intellectual and as Floyd Dell's "current girlfriend" at the time of the second Masses trial. Recounts the all-night ferry-boat ride taken by Dell, Reed, and M.
228. Rosta, Paul. "The Magazine that Taught Farrell, Fitzgerald, and Millay How to Write." American Heritage 35 (Dec. 1985): 40.
Commentary on St. Nicholas Magazine. Reprints letter from M to the magazine thanking the editors for their help and encouragement with her juvenile poems. She was listed on the magazine's Honor Roll over a dozen times.
229. Rovit, Earl. "Our Lady-Poets of the Twenties." Southern Review 16 (Jan. 1980): 65-85.
Review of female poets who rose to prominence between 1912 and the Depression, one of whom was M. Studies effect of gender on this "resolutely individualistic group of female poets" who struggled with older tradition of gentility and new liberal ideas. Critical opinion has "condescended egregiously" and "grossly" overrated these women while castigating them for failure to adopt today's feminist consciousness. Used lyric form because they may have been "constitutionally unable to make a rigorous use of their biographies" or the "psychological abnormalities of being professional female writers was so wrenching as to sever them from their childhoods." Focuses on "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" as representative of parts of the Cinderella myth.
230. Ruihley, Glenn Richard. "Millay, Edna St. Vincent." Great Writers of the English Language: Poets. Ed. James Vinson. Vol. 1. London: Macmillan, 1979. 692-94.
Primary bibliography, brief biography, and short assessment. At times, "the reader may feel oppressed by the weight of her tortured self-absorption, but this is the price that must be paid for the sharply etched and poignant account of her soul's turnings."
231. Russell, Francis. "The Hills of Camden; A Visit to the Girlhood Home of Edna St. Vincent Millay." Blair and Ketchum's Country Journal 4 (Nov. 1977): 94-95.
Describes view of Camden, Maine, and Penobscot Bay from Mount Battie, the scene of "Renascence." M did not surpass that poem. M was the "arch-poetess of a more naive era" and was concerned about her personal and artistic immortality. Although little read, she will not be forgotten.
232. Russell, Julie Ann Hauff. "The Representation of Female Authors and Male Minority Authors in Selected Secondary School American Literature Anthologies between 1958-1993." Diss. U of North Dakota, 1993. DAI 54/10 (1994): 3692.
Notes that in the anthologies surveyed, only two women authors were represented--Emily Dickinson and M.
233. Salter, Mary Jo. "The Heart Is Slow to Learn." New Criterion 10 (1992): 23-29.
M's career is "one of our century's extreme cautionary tales about the whim of critical favor." Cites Colin Falck's centenary edition of SP as illustrating that she would be "ill-used by the anthologists." Although easy to read, she was "hard to catetorize or excerpt." M provides real pleasures in "how wholly satisfyingly she could write in lines of unpredictable length, in random rhyme, or in no rhyme at all."
234. Sarlos, Robert Karoly. Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players: Theatre in Ferment. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1982.
Places M and her work in the milieu of the Provincetown Players and in Provincetown chronology of events. Discusses her role in The Angel Intrudes. Summarizes TSK and AC. See #169 for comment.
235. Schine, Cathleen. "Norma Millay: My Sister Never Wrote a Pome." Village Voice 25 (12 Nov. 1980): 63.
Recounts interview with 86-year-old Norma Millay at Steepletop, now a shrine to Edna maintained by Norma who is vain and theatrical and has tried to perpetuate the M legend. Cites Norma's response to M's death and her opinion of why (because she was a woman who made money) M is neglected in the universities.
236. Schwab, Arnold T. "Jeffers and Millay: A Literary Friendship." Robinson Jeffers Newsletter Sept. 1981: 18-33.
Documents with extensive citations from letters and journals the mutully admiring social as well as literary friendship between the two poets. Includes comments made by each on the other's work. M instrumental in Jeffers' being given a Book-of-the-Month Club award in 1937 and his election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1945.
237. Schweik, Susan M. "Writing Propaganda 'Like a Man': Millay (and MacLeish)." A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1992. 59-82.
Women's wartime poetry often met with outrage and misogyny, especially M's ML. ML was successful as war propaganda but was attacked as "failed war literature." M had personal conflicts over her propaganda work but defined it as ephemera, not lasting literature. Sees attack on M as gender-based. MacLeish's radio plays destabilized feminine prophecy by subsuming it into the masculine perspective. Compares M's radio drama to MacLeish's. Compares editions of ML.
238. Scott, Helen E. "Appreciation." Edna St. Vincent Millay: The Rebirth (1892-1950). Ed. M. Myers. Bristol: Bristol Banner, 1992. i-iii.
Short appreciation in book of poems dedicated to M. Brief biography and incomplete list of works. Mentions M's appreciation of nature.
239. "Seven Letters of Millay on the Publishing of Flowers of Evil." Tamarack 2 (Winter 1982-1983): 5-15.
Brief introduction sees M's preface to the translation of Baudelaire as "a splendid example of her powers as a prose writer." The letters show M's meticulous attention to detail in preparing the volume for publication.
240. Shannon, David A. Twentieth Century America. 4th edition. Vol. 2. Chicago: Rand, 1977.
Repeats #S124 but is not an exact reprint.
241. Shapiro, Karl. Review of Collected Poems. Thesing .103.Reprinted from Prairie Schooner 31 (Spring 1957): 13.
Calls M's love poetry "the most desperately middle-class love poetry one can imagine." Although it "rings so true" and is "so well said," it is "a parody of the great love poets."
242. Sheaffer, Louis. O'Neill: Son and Playwright. New York: AMS, 1988.
Reprinted from #S127..
243. Sieller, William Vincent. "A Course on Millay and Her Work." Tamarack 2 (Winter 1982-1983): 18-23.
Discusses a course given by Sieller while a community college English teacher. Records the students' reactions.
244. Sisk, John P. "The Dialectics of Nudity." Georgia Review 40 (Winter 1986): 897-906.
Uses M's poem "Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare" to illustrate the idea of nudity being the revelation of ultimate truth as opposed to the idea that truth is found in the covering or clothing of a person.
245. Smith, Bruce. "After Millay." The Times Literary Supplement 17-23 Mar. 1989: 269.
Poem addressed to M or to woman like M. Speaker wishes that beloved who rejected him would suffer as he does.
246. Smith, Willian Jay. "Louise Bogan: A Woman's Words." Critical Essays on Louise Bogan. Ed. Martha Collins. Boston: Hall, 1984. 101-18.
Reprinted from #S135.
247. Snyder, Jane McIntosh. "The Web of Song: Weaving Imagery in Homer and the Lyric Poets." Classical Journal 76 (Feb.-Mar. 1981): 193-96.
Notes links between weaving and singing in the Greek mind and the use of weaving metaphors for the poetic arts. Footnote cites "Ballad of the Harp-Weaver" as one of the "modern analogues for the metaphorical uses of weaving."
248. Sprague, Rosemary. "Edna St. Vincent Millay." Thesing. 174-78.
Excerpted from Imaginary Gardens 1969: 135-82. Attempts to assess the nature of Millay's poetry by relating it to her life and times. Biographical details drawn largely from Miriam Gurko, Restless Spirit: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, New York: Crowell, 1962.
249. Stanbrough, Jane. "Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Language of Vulnerability." Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Woman Poets. Ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1979. 183-99.
Examination of M's consciously cultivated image of bohemianism, liberation, and self-possession, which hid a "private anxiety-ridden image of profound self-doubt and personal anguish." Finds a sense of personal vulnerability, victimization, and constriction in the language and structural pattern of M's poetry. Discusses M's child-like narrator. FI and "Sonnets From an Ungrafted Tree" seen as "extended narratives of woman's psychological disintegration."
250. - - -. "Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Language of Vulnerability." Thesing. 213-28.
Reprinted from #249.
251. - - -. Rev. of Millay in Greenwich Village, by Anne Cheney. Denver Quarterly 10 (Autumn 1975): 142-45.
Finds Cheney's book superficial. Discusses M's relationships with lovers to point out avenues of thought unexplored by Cheney. Calls for further feminist as well as pychological study of M's life and work.
252. Stauffer, Donald Barlow. A Short History of American Poetry. New York: Dutton, 1974.
Compares M to Lizette Reese, Countee Cullen, Louise Bogan, and Leoni Adams. A well-known figure, M reached her height in the 20s. Views M as "the poet of the striking phrase, the socially daring idea, the delicate suggestiveness and handling of sex." The best of her poetry combines clarity and simple diction combined with musicality.
253. Stinnett, Caskie. "Shangri-La in Casco Bay." Down East 27 (Sept. 1980): 68-71.
Tells how M acquired the Maine island. Tells about previous owner and describes the island as it presently is. Relates M's activities there. Includes two photographs. Reprints poem "Ragged Island."
254. Suarez, Kathryn E. "Changing Views of the Changing of the Season: Edna St. Vincent Millay's 'Spring'." Occident 103 (1990): 280-83.
Close analysis of M's figurative language showing that the title is used ironically. It raises "stereotypical connotations" that are inverted by a negative treatment of the season. M "systematically uglifies nature," thus violating conventional expectations. She provides a new interpretation of an old reality.
255. Symons, Arthur. "Miss Millay's Kinship to Keats." Thesing. 129-132.
Reprinted from Literary Digest International Book Review 2 (April 1924): 351-52. Kinship to Keats only one concern in this article. It also discusses the similarity of some of M's poetry to that of Poe, Yeats, Huysmans, and others.
256. Taggard, Genevieve. "Edna St. Vincent Millay." Thesing 137-40.
Reprinted from #S137.
257. Tate, Allen. "Baudelaire in Translation." Poetry Reviews of Allen Tate: 1924-1944. Ed. Ashley Brown and Frances Neel Cheney. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P, 1983. 174-76.
Reprinted from Nation 143 (4 July 1936): 22-23. The attempt by the translators, M and Charles Dillon, to retain the French hexameters has resulted in much being put into English that was not in the French.
258. - - -. "Edna St. Vincent Millay." Poetry Reviews of Allen Tate: 1924-1944. Ed. Ashley Brown and Frances Neel Cheney. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P, 1983. 119-23.
Reprinted from New Republic 66 (6 May 1931): 335-36. Review of FI. Sees M as a poet of the second level whose mind does not alter the intelligence or create a complete world view. She is a sensibility, not an intellect. Finds that FI is worth all her previous work. Praises "special rhythm and sharply defined imagery."
259. - - -. "Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edith Sitwell, Wallace Stevens." Poetry Reviews of Allen Tate, 1924-1944. Ed. Ashley Brown and Frances Neel Cheney. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P, 1983. 8-11.
Reprinted from #S143.
260. - - -. "Miss Millay's Sonnets." Thesing. 61-64.
Reprinted from New Republic 66 (6 May 1931): 335-36. See #258.
261. - - -. "R. P. Blackmur and Others." Poetry Reviews of Allen Tate, 1924-1944. Ed. Ashley Brown and Frances Neel Cheney. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P, 1983. 177-91.
Reprinted from #S144.
262. Taylor, Betty Lee. "Spiritual and Social Quest in the Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay." Diss. U of Oregon, 1987. DAI-A 42/07 (1987): 2581.
Characterizes M's art as the center of her life. She was "fully awake to the rights and obligations of artist, woman, and human being." M described as "the ideal woman artist," taking her "spiritual enlightenment into the social realm." Within confines of a sexist society she created "a physically and mentally emancipating life."
263. Thesing, William B. Introduction. Thesing. 1-25.
Includes a short biography and a survey of: (1) book reviews of M's work; (2) critical essays from 1950 to 1990; (3) books on M.
264. Thorp, Willard. Rev. of Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Thesing. 91-94.
Reprinted from American Literature 25 (May 1953): 240-43. Review also includes The Letters of Hart Crane. Claims M and her friends were closer to the "American average" than Crane and his circle. Speculates that because many of her friends were not deeply concerned about literature, M did not write many letters on poetry.
265. Toynton, Evelyn. "Poetry and Gender." Commentary 93 (June 1992): 59-61.
Review of SP.Finds that editor Colin Falck displays "more sensibility than sense" in his choice of poems. M lacks toughness of mind, unlike Marianne Moore, for example. Asserts that poets like M and Sara Teasdale are being raised by feminists to a stature they did not really earn.
266. Rev. of Two Slatterns and a King. Thesing. 47.
Reprinted from Booklist 18 (June 1922): 324. Brief. Called "slight but amusing."
267. Untermeyer, Louis. "Edna St. Vincent Millay." Thesing. 115-120.
Reprinted from American Poetry Since 1900, 1923: 214-21. Discussion and description of several of M's early volumes, incuding SA, which recaptures the ecstasy of "Renascence." "Hers is a voice that is both intellectually thrilling and emotionally moving."
268. - - -. "Song from Thistles." Thesing. 57-60.
Reprinted from Saturday Review of Literature 5 (13 Oct. 1928): 209. Review of BS. Cites good technique, a preoccupation with death, and the unevenness of the volume. Highly praises final seven sonnets.
269. - - -. "Why A Poet Should Never Be Educated." Thesing. 29-32.
Reprinted from Dial 64 (14 Feb. 1918): 145-47. Review of RN with two other books. Finds "Renascence" fresh and sincere. Poems written after Vassar are less spontaneous.
270. Van Doren, Carl. "Youth and Wings: Edna St. Vincent Millay: Singer." Thesing. 112-28.
Reprinted from Century 106 (June 1923): 310-16. Essay in five sections. Commentary on and history of "Renascence"; AC as representative of its time; M as spirit of Greenwich Village; M's candor in writing of love; beauty as her concern. Implies she is not a minor poet.
271. Van Doren, Mark. "Women of Wit." Thesing. 45-46.
Excerpted from Nation 113 (26 Oct. 1921): 482. Reviews of works by other authors are omitted here. M has improved remarkably between RN and SA. Comments on LB as being Elizabethan in its asides and metaphors yet it is not derivative.
272. Voigt, Ellen Bryant. "Poetry and Gender." Kenyon Review, New Series, 9 (Summer 1987): 127-40.
Review of #194. Discusses the importance of gender to an aesthetic and the Skidmore College Millay Conference of October 1986 in which questions of assessment were diverted. Cites M's inclusion or exclusion in recent anthologies. Sees the real issue regarding M as the relationship of poetry to character, not to gender.
273. Von Rhein, John. "Chicago." Opera News 45 (Sept. 1980): 56.
Review of Chamber Opera House's performance of operatic version of AC. Brief comments on text apart from score. The verse drama combines commedia dell' arte with a "twist of" Pirandello. Notes its lyricism.
274. Waggoner, Hyatt H. "Edna St. Vincent Millay." American Poets: From the Puritans to the Present. Rev. ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P, 1984. 464-68.
Reprinted from #S156.
275. Walker, Cheryl. "Women on the Market: Edna St. Vincent Millay's Body Language." Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1991. 135-64.
Examines M's poetry as a point at which culture, psyche, and gender converge. Her language relating to the body is a change from past women's poetry and a "recuperation of oppressive patriarchal attitudes." Discusses M's relation to her own body and her persona fonded on her physical presence. Looks at cultural components of her treatment of the body in her poetry. Sees 1930-1936 as the peak of M's professional career. Says M was not truly subversive but was formed by her culture and demonstrates women's difficulty in thinking outside cultural limits.
276. Walker, Warren S. "Notes After an 18c Stamp Honoring Millay, a 2c Commemorative." Turn-of-the-Century Women 1 (Summer 1984): 46-48.
Not about the stamp but rather reminiscences of M by Walker, who attended a high school in a town near M's Berkshire estate. Reports some of the local gossip about M at the time and his experiences in seeing her attending a local playhouse. Found her "rather nondescript," even "unkempt" in appearance.
277. Ward, Cynthia. "Vanity Fair: The Magazine and the Style 1914-1936." Diss. SUNY Stony Brook (1983). DAI-A 44/12 (1984): 3774.
Concerned almost exclusively with the history of the magazine. M is mentioned as one of those contributors developing a"a modern style."
278. Watts, Emily Stipes. "Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) and Elinor Wylie (1887-1928)." Poetry of American Women From 1632 to 1945. The Dan Danciger Publications ser. Austin: U of Texas P, 1977. 170-73.
Discusses M and Wylie as "lyrists" and as poets. M anticipated new women poets of 1930s.
279. Wayne, John J. "The Passing '92s: Some Sources for Celebration." Library of Congress Information Bulletin 51 (18 May 1992): 211-17.
Includes M's birth in list of significant people and events associated with the years "92" since Columbus arrived in the New World. Cites her early popularity and association with bohemianism, her accomplishments, and her later decline, which was associated with her indifference to living. Predicts a reassessment.
280. Weeks, Brigitte. "From the Editor-in-Chief." Book-of-the-Month Club News, Mar. 1990: 30.
Reports that in response to her query of members to nominate a favorite poet, M got "many votes."
281. Westbrook, Perry D. "Edna St. Vincent Millay at Steepletop." Conservationist 29 (Dec.-Jan. 1974-75): 16-19.
Article focuses on M's home Steepletop, a National Historic Landmark, and the importance of nature to M. Describes Steepletop, M's life there, the natural beauty which was her subject, her intense interest in birds, her concern for wildlife.
282. Wheeler, Dennis. "Jennifer Hood: Actress, Writer." Advocate 1 (Jan. 1991): 56.
Hood performed in her own one-woman show about M, who is described as "a rowdy romatic rebel, a pacifist, and a poet ahead of her time."
283. Whitridge, Arnold. "Baudelaire in English." Thesing. 69-71.Reprinted from Yale Review 25 (June 1936): 821-23.
Review of FE. Considers M "too individual a genius" to translate another poet. By attempting to presere the integrity of the meter and form of Baudelaire, M and her collaborator George Dillon have failed to convey the "temper" of Baudelaire, who is made to seem "too easy-going."
284. Wickes, George. The Amazon of Letters: The Life and Loves of Natalie Barney. New York: Putnam, 1976.
Briefly mentions that in the 1920s, M visited Barney's salon, "one of the standard tourist attractions for the American writers who flocked to Paris."
285. Wildman, Mary. "Twentieth-Century Arthurian Literature: An Annotated Bibliography." Arthurian Literature. Ed. Richard Barber. Vol 2. Cambridge (Eng.): Brewer, 1982. 127-62.
Cites "Elaine" and "Tristam" in SA and CP in bibliography listing works that deal with the Arthurian legend.
286. Williams, Amelia Louise. "Venus' Hand: Laughter and the Language of Children's Culture in the Poetry of Christina Rossetti, Edith Sitwell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Stevie Smith." Diss. U of Virginia, 1993. DAI-A 54/08 (1994): 3048.
The four poets considered "used the language of children's culture," e.g., nursery rhyme rhythms and fairy-tale themes, to deal with "the semiotic border between adult seriousness and the whimsy of children's cultural forms." Argues that "the broader concept of children's culture" gives us a means by which to see "the links among the themes and strategies of a number of women poets."
287. Wilson, Edmund. "The All-Star Literary Vaudeville." Thesing. 141-42.Reprinted from New Republic 47 (30 June 1926): 158-63 ff.
Essay listing merits of contemporary writers. M is most important woman poet of the time, perhaps one of the most important of all contemporary poets. She has a "singular boldness" that has the effect of making other productions "take on the aspect of literary convention."
288. - - -. "'Give That Beat Again.'" Thesing. 77-81.
Reprinted from New Republic 91 (28 July 1937): 338-40. Review of CM. Says dialogue is inconclusive because M lacks a "dramatic imagination." Compares CM with M's "Nancy Boyd" pieces.
289. Wiltenburg, Robert. "Millay and the English Renaissance Lyric." Thesing. 287-92.
Original to this volume. M's affinities with English Renaissance lyrics, which she knew well, "run deep." In Renaissance poetry she found help in dealing with her "most characteristic subjects." Considers "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" "more consistently successful" than FI. "It is worthy of Donne."
290. Woodbridge, Annie S. "Millay in Spanish." Jack London Newsletter 11 (May-Dec. 1978): 105-106.
Short article on Salomon de la Selva's friendship with M, his translation of her poetry, and his critical essay on her work. Quotes translation of "First Fig." His translation of "Renascence" included four lines not in original.
291. Woodward, Deborah. "This More Fragile Boundary: The Female Subject and the Romance Plot in the Texts of Millay, Wylie, Teasdale, Bogan." Diss. U. of Washington, 1993. DAI-A 54/05 (1993): 1807.
The two chapters on M examine her "awareness of her own increasingly 'abject' status as 'representative woman poet.'" M's "Nancy Boyd" pieces explore her "awareness of social constriction and of the poet as woman."
292. Woollcott, Alexander. "Second Thoughts on First Nights: There Are War Plays and War Plays." Thesing. 39-43.
Reprinted from New York Times 14 Dec. 1919, sec. 8: 2. Review of production of AC. Calls the play first inscrutable then enigmatic. Yet says it is "the most beautiful and most interesting play in English to be seen in New York."
293. Wright, Carl C. "Poems Reaching Over the Decades." Christian Science Monitor 9 Jan. 1990: 20.
Author recounts memory of M's appearance and manner in a 1929 poetry reading. Short discussion of "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver," a poem saved from sentimentality by artistry. Notes popularity of "Renascence" in student speaking contests. Although her critical reputation declined, her influence on her admirers and on "aspiring poets will go unchallenged."
294. York, Sherry. Rev. of Edna St. Vincent Millay: Poet, by Carolyn Daffron. Book Report 8 (1990): 38.
Very brief description. Daffron ties events in M's life to "historical events," uses quotations from her works throughout the text.
295. Young, Arthur Henry. Art Young; His Life and Times. Ed. John Nicholas Beffel. Westport: Hyperion, 1975.
Reprinted from #S165.
© 1996 Judith Nierman and John J. Patton
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