Sound of the Axe on Fresh Wood

On July 19, 1923, before Edna St. Vincent Millay was due to undergo surgery for appendicitis, she told her friend Arthur Ficke, “If I die now, I shall be immortal.” This wasn’t anaesthesia-induced hubris. The 31-year-old Millay was one of the most famous women in the United States; she had mouth-watering sales figures (not even with the gently pitying caveat “for a poet”) and was a huge draw at readings across the country. Her personal life—or at least the persona she projected and played up to—was the stuff of legend. As the editor Tristram Fane Saunders notes in his introduction to a new selected Poems and Satires (Carcanet Press, 2021), Millay inspired ordinarily hard-hearted types to gush and fawn: “She was too beautiful to live among mortals,” Richard Eberhart declared in his introduction to a previous edition of selected poems. Professional tastemakers such as Edmund Wilson and John Reed lined up to woo her, only to be hastily rebuffed. Wilson’s marriage proposal was one of several Millay turned down. As biographer Nancy Milford writes of Millay’s wounded admirers in Savage Beauty (2002), “They wrote to her about their desperate hurt and anger; they waylaid her on the street … they talked about her chagrin, even when it was clearly their own; they talked about her promiscuity and her puzzling magnanimity.”

Not only the men and women in Millay’s life were enthusiastically hung up on her undiscriminating sex appeal. Press reports of her public performances focused more on her dazzling red hair and floaty dresses than on the work itself. Though her personal charisma went some way toward explaining her popularity, her poems—shapely, musical, wittily provocative—were what lodged in a generation’s ear. Louis Untermeyer, on first encountering Millay, suspected her of being “a poet for the elect” rather than the masses but did recognize in her both novelty and uniqueness: “There was no other voice like hers in America. It was the sound of the ax on fresh wood.”

Millay’s poems were modern but not Modernist—to their later disadvantage, at least in terms of their critical afterlife. Millay was wedded to traditional forms, especially the sonnet, into which she breathed a great deal of new-womanish zeal, happily playing the part of the ingénue and then girl about town, embracing her reputation as a bed-hopping libertine. Her diction was often old-fashioned—sometimes knowingly, artfully so—going in for Elizabethan rhetorical unfurling or making hay with a kind of “who, me?” insouciance. The sonnet form, and her metrical facility, was a means of bridging tradition and ultra-contemporary attitudes. She used familiar tropes—grapes, death, and ancient gestures (“I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron: / Penelope did this too”)—as well as poetic expostulations and Shakespearean imagery but struck out for fresh ground within these stabilizing, self-imposed constrictions. Millay was immersed in classical poetry and was an exceptional technician, but the lighter, breezier poems of A Few Figs from Thistles (1920) made her a celebrity. “First Fig” became a sort of anthem. It was the “Jazz Babies’ … rallying cry” in Milford’s words or “the candle one,” as Millay’s sister called it:

My candle burns at both ends;
    It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends –
    It gives a lovely light!

The poem has something in common with Millay’s beloved Greeks, an instinct that pervades much of her work: there’s the idea of love as celebratory and worth fully surrendering to, even if love is itself impermanent, and there’s the idea of death as the only reliable constant in life. Though the latter attitude could lead other poets to morbidity or paralyzing despair, for Millay the only worthwhile answer to such an existentialist dilemma was to seize pleasure while it was possible—defiance in the face of the grave. There is also, in her early, fame-making poems, a great deal of radical thought about what being a woman meant and what it meant to operate within bourgeois society’s restraints of marriage, respectability, and all-around good behavior. Colin Falck, in the introduction to his 1992 selection of Millay’s poems, wrote

She recognizes that the war between body and soul that afflicts her is really not a metaphysical necessity but a war between a woman’s spiritual independence and the roles that society, and especially men, have insisted on casting her in … what may superficially look like the celebration of indulgence or flightiness … is invariably some form of repudiation.

The presence of the (often ignorant) male gaze can be felt in the poems but is also apparent in some of the prose Fane Saunders reproduces, such as “The Implacable Aphrodite,” much of which was published in Vanity Fair in 1921, under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd. Millay used stage directions in the story to play a game with readers that would be just as lost on an audience as it was on the male protagonist. The loaded explanation “She is cruelly slicking a lemon, by means of a small dagger with which a Castilian nun has slain three matadors” leaves readers, like the story’s besotted Mr. White, to think only that Miss Black, the object of his attention, “looks gentle and domestic.” In her poems, Millay was equally mischievous regarding her image as a heartbreaker. In “That Love at length should find me out and bring,” she skewers the public perception of herself as promiscuous by presenting the speaker as a woman brought down by love: “Myself your slave herein have I confessed: / Thus far, indeed, the world may mock at me; / But if I suffer, it is my own affair.”

There is a certain irony, then, when reading Millay’s newly published diaries Rapture and Melancholy (Yale University Press, 2022), edited by Daniel Mark Epstein, to come upon an early entry in which the teenage poet lists all the means of torture she would mete out to anyone who dares snoop in its pages, including “the rack, the guillotine, the axe, the scaffold, or any other form of torture I may see fit to administer.”

Though it’s true of any diary not necessarily intended for publication that an element of intrusion, or voyeurism, accompanies readers’ experiences, someone coming to Millay’s diaries looking for scandal or pillow-talk will go away unfulfilled. Although the publication comprises almost the entirety of Millay’s known journals, during great swathes of her life she was either too busy, or distracted, to keep a record. Frustratingly, it’s the missing periods one most wishes to have insight into; the diaries can sometimes seem like the uneventful calms between offstage storms. What readers do get is a portrait of a pre-fame, adolescent Millay and, later, a relatively content and settled poet-celebrity. By then she was holed up at Steepletop, the farm in Austerlitz, New York, that she bought with her wealthy Dutch businessman husband Eugen Boissevain and cultivated into a bolthole, an antidote to all the metropolitan swanking and fast living of her single years. Ultimately, these diaries show us the young writer who was a sensitive, often forlorn, aspirant and the established poet at the apex of literary fame who achieved her wildest early fantasies but little in between.

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Millay was born in 1892 in Rockland, Maine, and the story of her childhood poverty and her responsibility for minding the house and her two younger sisters is well-known from biographies and letters. There is, however, still a charge in seeing a young Millay confide to a diary that figured first as a sort of surrogate mother while her own mother was endlessly away from the home working as a nurse. Millay complains frequently of the cold, of her loneliness and tiredness, of her endless bouts of malaise; parties, Sunday school, and other events are frequently missed because she is “sick abed.” Later, “Mammy Hush-Chile,” as she named her diary, in line with a then-dominant trope of a comforting servant figure, gave way to “Vigils,” with a new diary-as-lover. Millay invented a fantasy of romantic assignation and shifted the pages’ role from nursemaid to beau. At age 20, she confides to her journal, “I do not think there is a woman in whom the roots of passion shoot deeper than in me.”

Millay’s gift, and precocity, needed its dose of good fortune along the way, first in the shape of a wealthy patroness, Caroline Dow, the dean of the New York YWCA. Dow “discovered” Millay performing her poems at a masquerade dance and implored her to attend Vassar, away from the rural life of chores and anonymity. Millay had already begun to make a name for herself as a poet by the time of this encounter; however, as Fane Saunders wryly points out, “she might be the only author to have risen to prominence by losing a competition.” Despite the promises of one of the judges, Ferdinand Earle, with whom Millay corresponded, her poem “Renascence,” an odd blending of “spiritual intensity with religious sophistication,” to use Falck’s description, missed the top prize in the 1912 Lyric Year competition. Poems were selected for publication in a widely publicized anthology, with a prize given to the poem the editorial panel judged the “best.” The ensuing disgruntlement of the poem’s admirers brought more attention, and reviews, for Millay than a victory might have. It’s difficult to understand quite why “Renascence” occasioned such a clamor, but some of its attitudes (“But East and West will pinch the heart / That can not keep them pushed apart / And he whose soul is flat – the sky / Will cave in on him by and by”) herald her mature work.

Millay’s rise to the top of the poetry food chain in the United States was rapid, and by the time she arrived in New York for a foundational year at Barnard to secure her entry to Vassar, already three years older than her classmates, she was in a position to take tea with some of the most established poets of her day, such as Untermeyer and Sara Teasdale, as well as earn special favors from the Vassar faculty. Missed deadlines and nights out off campus were routinely forgiven, although she almost missed her graduation after one infraction too many, only to find herself the beneficiary of a student campaign to overturn the ruling. She wrote in her diary in 1913, still relatively new to the metropolis, “I can’t study now; I’m too old; I ought to be through college at my age, and I know it, and I have other things to think about, and I can’t study.”

There were indeed other things to think about: a sudden whirlwind of publications, trips to Paris, a journalistic tour of Albania, pieces to write for Vanity Fair; there were high-profile friends and lovers, often discarded on a whim only to find Millay’s inconstancy played up in the poems that followed, such as “I shall forget you presently, my dear,” “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,” and “I, being a woman, and distressed.” The only enduring commitment of these years was to writing, as Edmund Wilson ruefully acknowledged: “Her poetry, you soon found out, was her real over-mastering passion.” He found Millay to be “impartial,” interested in people only as subjects for more poems.

Milford contends, with reasonable cause, that the real love of Millay’s early life was her mother, Cora, the often-absent, much-missed woman who initiated Millay’s devotion to writing and performance. But now that Millay was doing the leaving, to find fame in the field in which her mother once harbored ambitions, “Her guilt was almost always linked to having abandoned Cora, but she assuaged it only with money, not by returning.” A large part of the appeal of Millay’s work in the 1920s was her willingness to skewer prevailing norms, particularly with regards to gender. She did it in life, as on the page, and noted in her diaries as early as 1911 that “the world is civilized to death.” In 1912, she asked herself, “what do I care for conventions and proprieties, anyway? It seems to me I am very little governed by them as it is.”

Her marriage to Boissevain must have seemed incongruous, at least from the outside, to those readers most committed to seeing her as an avatar for sexual unconstraint. In truth, Millay continued to do more or less as she pleased. Her affair with the poet and editor George Dillon wasn’t so much tolerated as encouraged by her husband, who also served as a full-time caretaker and amanuensis, the type of allegiance she had never had despite the many apparently besotted and jettisoned suitors. What is clear, via the Steepletop diaries, is the extent to which rural life was less a capitulation to a cozily smug routine and more a means of survival; she had a place to write, think, and breathe, which became increasingly important as her health deteriorated. A 1936 auto mishap damaged Millay’s spine and required frequent surgeries—as well as daily doses of morphine. What Boissevain gave her, aside from almost cartoonish dedication, was a security that wasn’t synonymous with boredom. It was a chance to replay her rural childhood but with someone else doing all the caring and heavy lifting. Readers don’t get much gossip in these sections of the diary, aside from some neighborly irritation and a few surprising anti-servant rants (“They are not really human beings at all”), nor the sort of soap-opera entertainments that might be had from a diary of her party years, but there are unguarded moments of delight, such as one, in 1927, in which she basks in her new royalty check: “what fun we’ve had!—how happy we are!”

For all her having been co-opted into the high life of 1920s New York and Paris, Millay was a country girl too, first and enduringly, and some of the most memorable images in her diary are descriptions of creatures witnessed at Steepletop. Her eye for detail and her naturally musical phrasing turn these sightings to glitter on the page: a fox is “beautiful, pure gold, like a flame moving through the bushes”; a group of tanagers are “so brilliant in the sun they were almost too dazzling to look at; they seemed incandescent, six small Holy Grails.” This Millay, far from the madding crowd, rooted, peaceable, and content, is caught at times in almost picture-book recollections of joy: “I caught a butterfly under my beret, thinking it was a swallow-tail.” Although the early years at Steepletop weren’t always champagne and badminton, they were, often, just that; her enjoyment of the good life starkly contrasted with the freezing rooms and aimless pining of her youth.

Her time at the farm, like her literary reputation, didn’t remain the stuff of fairy tales. After the 1936 accident, morphine and heavy drinking took their toll. Daniel Mark Epstein suggests that Millay’s final diaries are “some of the most curious, sad, and shocking documents ever to see the light of publication,” a claim grounded on Millay’s running tallies of drugs taken, the dosages itemized alongside the hour of the day, demonstrating that at this point the administering of morphine had become not only habitual but suffocatingly routine.

One reason for Millay’s literary decline had to do with her being out of step with prevailing poetic tastes—especially hard to take for a woman who once represented her generation’s vanguard, in her persona if not her well-turned stanzas. The sliding out of fashion began as early as the late 1920s. Milford documents a lunch Millay shared with Edmund Wilson in 1927, during which the poet defended herself against the charge of having lost her edge: “She didn’t know the new slang, and he did. She’d never heard of Hart Crane, and Wilson had. Suddenly she said to him, ‘I’m not a pathetic figure—I’m not!’” Her war years were especially difficult. She turned out largely artless propaganda, championing American intervention into what was popularly seen as Europe’s problem. She told reporters, “If I live or die as a poet it won’t matter, but anyone who believes in democracy and freedom and love and culture and peace ought to be busy now.”

Despite her struggles with addiction and despite lapsing into left-handed work for a noble cause, Millay’s final poems were revelatory. She had learned some lessons her detractors had accused her of ignoring, and she had taken from poets such as Robinson Jeffers a new capacity for free verse that retained much of her musicality. She introduced internal rhyme and proved adept at sustaining a complicated but free-moving syntax across clause-heavy lines, as in “New England Spring, 1942”:

But spring is wise. Pale and with gentle eyes, one day
           somewhat she advances;
The next, with a flurry of snow into flake-filled skies re-
            treats before the heat in our eyes, and the thing de-
            signed
By the sick and longing mind in its lonely fancies –

This was free verse under discipline, sharing something with D.H. Lawrence’s best poems. Lawrence was a writer with whom she shared other common threads, including a Whitmanian inheritance and a lifelong disavowal of being “civilized to death.” Millay’s late poems—published posthumously as Mine the Harvest (1954)—don’t feature much in Fane Saunders’s selection. As he explains in his introduction, the book is intended to take a middle road when compared to Falck’s 1992 selection, which presented Millay as an innovator. With this in mind, Fane Saunders includes some of Millay’s most popular poems, such as “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver,” which laid her bare to accusations of sentimentality, an unhelpful traditionalism, and wilfully heavy-handed symbolism. He separates the sonnets from the other work, as Millay tended to do, but there are plenty of fine achievements in both sections, and poems such as “Dirge Without Music,” “Recuerdo,” “Rendezvous,” and “Modern Declaration” are fit company for any poems of their era. Poems and Satires is more a reintroduction of a once-ubiquitous voice than a full reckoning of Millay’s poetic achievement, but seeing most of her best work in new covers is heartening. And though readers cannot eavesdrop on her wild years in the diaries, there is something pleasing, if unexpected, about overhearing this Jazz Baby among the butterflies and tanagers, thoroughly enjoying the fruits of her songs.