‘I Know What I Know’

In her captivating introduction, Holly Peppe, Millay’s literary executor, recalls her days as a graduate student and emerging Millay scholar. Devoted to learning all she could about her subject, she reached out to the poet’s younger sister Norma, who was then 89 and living in her sister’s home at Steepletop, a 700-acre farm in Austerlitz, New York. The two formed a unique and lively relationship rooted in a shared reverence for Millay’s writing. Norma was cautious of critics who, despite (or perhaps because of) Millay’s enormous popularity with readers during her lifetime, as well as her winning the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1923, had all but shut her sister’s work out of the academy. Thus, Norma gave Peppe a condition: “You must memorize every sonnet you want to talk about with me and recite it before we begin a discussion.” Peppe was up to the task, and her friendship with Norma led to her spending weeks at a time at Steepletop, where she became closely acquainted with the place where Millay lived and wrote for a quarter-century.

Peppe describes her experiences at Steepletop with enticing detail and dialogue, climaxing in her following Norma’s request one afternoon that she try on Millay’s evening gowns, hunting clothes, and pajamas in order to check their condition. While these experiences were thrillingly intimate, Peppe came away from them with the realization that her scholarly approach to Millay’s work had not been “attentive enough to the shifts between poet and persona. .  .  . I abandoned the notion that [Millay’s] poems were like pages torn from her diary.”

The introduction moves on to provide a useful overview of Millay’s personal story, writing career, reputation, critical and popular reception, and feminist legacy. Peppe’s seriousness and intelligence about Millay’s work echo throughout the book, which seems fueled in part by the urge to disprove the critics who dismissed—and in some cases attacked—Millay as too “traditional” or “unintellectual” to compete with modernist giants such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Peppe concludes, “Perhaps the still vibrant ‘lovely light’ I see approaching from the distance is recognition for Millay’s role in American literature and culture, making its way forward at last.”

This volume, then, is indeed “a lovely light,” as it will surely reinvigorate Millay fans and energize new readers. The annotations are spare but compelling, providing many fresh lenses through which to study and appreciate the poetry. Emphasis is given to Millay’s later works, and her versatility is highlighted by the inclusion of poems that take on a wide variety of subjects and forms, from ballads to sonnets to sharp-edged free verse.

Millay’s legacy as a feminist can be felt throughout her poetry. One comes to know a speaker standing on the edge of great cultural change, singing fiercely about taboo subjects, such as the fleeting nature of sexual passion, from a female perspective. Millay’s carpe diem approach to life glimmers in many of her poems, though never more directly than in her famous quatrain “First Fig.” Here is the poem in its entirety:

In the context of Selected Poems, the third line takes on greater meaning, as Millay is a poet who seems keenly aware of the diversity of her readers’, and critics’, opinions, and speaks boldly to both “foes” and “friends.” Often, the speaker demonstrates a defiant and empowering commitment to her view of things. Consider, for example, the final lines of the elegiac “Dirge Without Music.”

From her early writing onward, Millay’s talent for using imagery and tone to upend rigid gender expectations is evident. In “Spring,” for example, she uses a tone of icy contempt that eviscerates what traditional gender roles might lead one to expect from a young woman observing the season of blooming. The poem begins:

And ends:

An annotation provides the noteworthy fact that “Millay’s poem appeared in The Chapbook (London) in July 1920, two years before T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, with its similarly dismissive tone toward spring.” Another annotation points to the poem’s allusion to the famous Macbeth passage that claims life “is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” In “Spring,” one can also see Millay’s continuous influence on the landscape of American poetry. One hears a seed of John Berryman’s declaration that “Life, friends, is boring.” Among contemporary poets, Louise Glück’s poetry perhaps most strongly carries the Millayian principle of “I know what I know.” In her poem “Mock Orange,” for example, Glück begins: “It is not the moon, I tell you. / It is these flowers / lighting the yard.” The simple “I tell you” is resonant of Millay’s tone in “Spring,” as it insists on the legitimacy of the speaker’s female perspective, no matter how unexpected or haunting.

Some of the weaker moments in Millay’s poetry occur when depictions of intense emotion cross into melodrama. In “When the tree-sparrows with no sound,” the speaker wakes from a dream of a lost loved one: “Yet clawed with desperate nails at the sliding dream, / screaming not to lose, since I cannot forget you. / I felt the hot tears come.” Millay’s most compelling poems delve into more nuanced emotional territory and invite deeper surprise and restraint into the language. In her self-portrait poem “E. St. V. M.,” for example, the lines have an eerie, startling power:

The final sections in this collection contain previously unpublished and uncollected poems, selections from Letters, and a previously unpublished letter. In a previously unpublished “Essay on Faith,” Millay puts forth her artistic and spiritual belief in the power of perception. The essay contains many gems, including “The majesty of fear brings everything to life” and “Believe all that is necessary to your happiness.” The letters section, though thin, provides glimpses of Millay’s vibrant personality, her extraordinary work ethic, and fierce protectiveness over her craft.

Reading from cover to cover, one feels immersed not only in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s intoxicating voice but also in the connections and influences of her world. With its ample size and exquisite design, the Selected Poems might also be employed as a coffee-table book, allowing readers to keep close at hand the work of one of the most important and continuously relevant voices in American poetry.

Chloe Honum is the author of The Tulip-Flame.