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Edna St. Vincent Millay:An American political lyric poet |
Washington Square 
Sacco and Vanzetti  John Dos Passos  Dorothy Parker |
Why was Edna St. Vincent Millay rejected
by the modernist, and is panned by literary critics today? In the roaring
twenties, Millay was a vital bohemian figure who associated with the modernists
writers and critics, wrote and acted with the
Provincetown Players , dated Floyd
Dell , an editor of
The Masses , and was an active participant in New York Salons.
When Millay first interacted with the New York modernists
and writers in the late teens and early twenties, she was considered to
be a gifted lyrical poet and playwright. In
1923, s he was the first woman to win the
Pulitzer Prize for poetry for “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver”,
“A Few Figs From Thistles” and eight sonnets published
in “American Poetry, 1922, a Miscellany”. Yet in the 1930s, when she physically removed herself from Manhattan (or France and the literary exiles, who would begin returning by the mid-1930s), her political views began to differ from the modernist and literary critics. Millay began to critique fascism and communism. Her popularity, she had become the female poetic voice of the public, combined with her self-imposed separation from the New York literary scene, offered Millay little opportunity to interact with other writers. She became an unacceptable figure to the serious New York writers, who began to overtly critique all that was not modernist 'technique', as expounded by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and the leading modernist writers. Further, the unspoken, but more relvealing factor, is that her political views alienated her from the accepted politics of Bohemian Greenwich Village. During the twenties, Millay's political poems expressed her support of pacifism and belief in human liberty. On August 23, 1927, Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti , were executed for killing two men in a payroll robbery. Because they were known to be anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to death despite the weak case by the prosecutor. (Some information claims that Sacco was guilty of the crime, whereas Vanzetti was innocent.) Their trial was seen to be a prosecution of the views held by the men, rather than based on their crimes. Many modernist writers saw their case as an example of liberty versus subjugation, of free speech and views versus restrictive legal and governmental control, and government censorship of political expression. Controversy over their sentence inspired protests in the U.S. and Europe. On the day of their execution, 25,000 people marched in protest in Boston. At the protest were many New York writers including Dorothy Parker, John Dos Passos , Mitchell Gold, and Millay. On the day before their death, Justice in Massachusetts was published on August 22, 1927, in the New York World. Millay commemorated their cause in four other poems, Justice Denied in Massachusetts, Hangman’s Oak, The Anguish, To Those Without Pity, and Wine from These Grapes (collected in The Buck in the Snow in 1928). In her protest of Sacco and Venzetti, Millay’s view was echoed by many other writers active in the New York scene and did not contradict any literary doctrine of the day. That is, she was in sync with the accepted views of New York modernist writers. .... For more information about the Political Millay and the Modernists, visit Political Paper. Critical Bibliography Politics paper Poetry Photo Gallery Major Works Biographical Time Line Awards Link List E-mail me Back to Modernism Home Page |