AT THIS LATE DATE, are there things left to say of the Poets’ Revolt, the literati’s defense of Saddam and bin Laden? (See J. Bottum’s The Poets vs. The First Lady.) Well, yes–that poets weren’t always this puerile and dotty, and sometimes could tell right from wrong. Exhibit A in this instance is Edna St. Vincent Millay, who, 60 years back, took her country to task with a vengeance–for not being warlike enough.
“In May, 1940, after a series of violent German assaults, Rotterdam was destroyed, Holland had fallen to the Nazis, and a last-ditch effort to repulse the German invasion had been pushed to the sea,” says Nancy Milford in Savage Beauty, her biography of the poet.
“On June 14, Paris fell . . . that morning, the New York Times, the Herald Tribune and the Daily News published Edna Millay’s stinging attack against isolationism, ‘Lines Written in deep Concern for England, France, and My Own Country.'”
“Not in years,” wrote the wire services, “has a poet sought so directly the ear of so wide a public . . . In an era in which poets have been accused of having too little to say to the many, Miss Millay suddenly launched her call to arms under the impact of the tragic drama in France.”
No man, no nation, is made free / By stating it intends to be, ran two of the lines from her poem. She didn’t stop there.
“Her poems began to run in newspapers around the country,” Milford informs us. “The urgency, despair and fury she felt about America’s response to the war, its continuing isolation, found voice in her work.” The New York Times Magazine published four more of her poems on October 13, and a wartime collection, “Make Bright the Arrows,” appeared on November 20.
Millay took a risk, and a hit, for her efforts, for polemics do not make for very good artwork. She called them “posters, not poems,” and said “I know bad poetry as well as the next one.” She explained to her friends, “This book is a book of impassioned propaganda, into which a few good poems got bound up, because they are propaganda too.”
She was willing to damage her own reputation, because she believed that the cause was important, and in this, of course, she was right. What Millay said did matter, as she had a huge following and her voice could reach very far. Millay was the dazzling “It” girl of the Bohemian ’20s who became a legend when serious writers had the status of rock stars, who sold hugely well in the depths of the Depression, and whose readings were always sold out. But she came from an age in which poetry was read widely by millions of literate people and Robert Frost was a national icon when John Kennedy, himself a poetry reader, asked him to speak at his inauguration in 1961.
But between 1961 and the present, poetry stopped being a popular interest, and, along with the serious middlebrow novel, all but dropped out of American life. Among current poets, there are no “It” girls or rock stars or icons, just oddballs who cluster in English departments, and write for themselves and each other.
Few Americans, the kind who once flocked to Millay, Frost, and others, would know the names of most of these rioting rhymesters, and if they do, it will be because these poets are now in their dotage, and famous for things written 40 years earlier.
Among the young, none are well-known, and for very good reason: They have left the American street for the Ivory Tower, the most airless room of the national attic, and the one most inclined to inversion and cluelessness. This is an attack of the unknown, armed with the unreadable, in defense of the unconscionable.
Call them the Edna St. Vincent Malaise.
Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
