’s Poetry In A Greenwich Village Context–by Nina Miller Essay, Research Paper
In the 1920s, Edna St. Vincent Millay was America’s most read,
most beloved poet. Critical biographer Elizabeth Atkins gives some indication of Millay’s
nationally "intoxicating effect on people" in describing the reception of her
second collection, A Few Figs from Thistles:
To say it became popular conveys but a faint idea of the truth. Edna St. Vincent Millay
became, in effect, the unrivaled embodiment of sex appeal, the It-girl of the hour, the
Miss America of 1920. It seemed there was hardly a literate young person in all the
English-speaking world who was not soon repeating [her verses].
Such dramatic national success had tangible effects on Millay’s status among New
Yorkers, naturally enough. Yet in this fact we also glimpse the dynamic circuit in which
New York took cues from the national culture even while dictating most of its terms.
Millay had an enormous literary and personal influence among the New York literati.
Greenwich Village regarded her "with awe" even before her arrival there, on the
strength of one passionate poem; John Peale Bishop and Edmund Wilson, young poets and
literary editors at the middle-brow journal Vanity Fair, made it a personal mission
to bring her work before a wide reading public; Genevieve Taggard and the other editors of
the high-art little magazine Measure took Millay as their unofficial poet laureate;
Countee Cullen, favorite son of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote his undergraduate thesis on
Millay and pursued his professional career along distinctly lyrical and traditional lines;
and even Dorothy Parker, embodiment of midtown urbanity , described her own significant
(and significantly national) career as a matter of following Millay’s example. In short,
in the era literary criticism has taught us to see as dominated by avant-garde formalism,
Millay’s passionate sonnets were widely admired and imitated by writers of all kinds.
But, as Atkins’s comment suggests, Millay stood for more than lyricism and sentiment;
she represented New Womanhood and the assertive female sexuality that gave focus to the
culture’s diffuse ambivalence about contemporary social change. Through a poetry that was
equal parts transgressive and traditional, Millay provided symbolic access to modernity
for her national audience. In the Village, she served to anchor bohemian identity in Free
Love, the pursuit of authentic intimate relations without interference from artificial
constraints, legal or social, or their psychological residue, jealousy. No mere hedonism,
the personal transformation upon which this ideal depended was seen explicitly as part of
wider cultural and political change. For the period of its greatest prominence, Edna St.
Vincent Millay was the exemplar of Free Love and Greenwich Village bohemia’s emblem of
self-understanding, its assurance of itself as a definable entity essentially different
from the bourgeois mainstream it opposed. And for women writers of modernist subcultural
New York-like those of this study—she was a powerful model for their own struggle to
reconcile the competing demands of a simultaneously public, iconic, and literary
femininity.
Many women who were writing in the late teens and twenties had to negotiate the
cultural paradigm of the New Woman, but Edna St. Vincent Millay had somehow to be her.
The nature of Millay’s position in bohemia makes her subcultural affiliation uniquely
accessible as a discrete determining force in her work. Widely represented in accounts of
bohemian life, she could not but respond in the course of representing herself. The
resulting dialogue between the subculture and its feminine icon makes a highly suggestive
beginning for exploring women’s public poetic strategy in modernist New York. . . .
Village Economies: "My candle burns at both ends"
Not a matter of wanton wastefulness but of almost methodical, tasking exhaustiveness,
the Bohemian project is thus aptly figured in the seemingly opposite, straightlacing,
vow-keeping, binding contract any sonnet must be.
Debra Fried, " Andromeda Unbound:
Gender and Genre in Millay’s Sonnets"
Embodying bohemian ideality presented Millay with enormous pressures, social pressure
not least among them. As Edmund Wilson wrote in his fictionalized rendition of the time:
"We [suitors] swarmed to her apartment, devoured her time and her force, and finally,
at the period of which I write, had rendered her life intolerable." But it is also
true that Millay participated actively in the construction of her own persona and
significantly shaped the very subcultural ideals to which it answered. Insofar as her
poems negotiated the imperatives of her authorial position, their principal task was the
management of a public, unconventional, female sexuality—one capable of reflecting
the self-image of a national as well as a bohemian readership. In this capacity Millay was
most New Woman: on the one hand, representing a concrete and accessible modernity in the
sexuality her poems expressed; on the other hand, in her lyricism, her traditional forms,
and even in her poetry as such, representing the rejection of the ordinary main- stream
world-including its fetishization of modernity. As the symbol of Free Love, she had to
balance male prerogative and conventional femininity as well as control the meaning of her
own universal desirability. The sexual circulation that set such desire in motion—as
represented in her poems and as enacted in the buying and selling of her books—made
her acutely vulnerable to denigration as a woman. It furthermore narrowed the crucial
distance between herself as a Yankee-bred bohemian and the peddling, bartering, marketing
women of the Italian Village. As we shall see, Millay tackled the intricacies of her
predicament partly through a synthesis of female sexuality and the typically bohemian
poetics of economy.
Millay’s early collections contain some of the best-known articulations of the bohemian
ethos. No stranger to scarcity , Millay had been raised in a spartan New England home, and
as a young professional poet kept body and soul together by writing
"bread-and-butter" pieces alongside her properly "artistic" endeavors.
As it happened, she was also keenly attuned to the aesthetic dimension of garret life.
But even her most seemingly straightforward paeans to Village freedom are undergirded
by perfect care and thrift. Written at the highpoint of her bohemian career,
"Recuerdo" spins out scenes of lighthearted romance within a kind of blueprint
for resource management.
We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on the hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.
We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.
We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "’God bless you!" for the apples and the pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.
The poem begins with an implicit refusal. Arranged contiguously, "We were very
tired" and "we were very merry" are conspicuously not explained by a
connecting "but." In fact, the ordering of the phrases implies that "we
were merry" because "we were tired." Having suggested (or asserted)
such an economy of plenitude, the speaker goes on to an image simultaneously suggestive of
bohemian antiproductivity and a dynamic of pure circulation: "We had gone back and
forth all night on the ferry." Each of the poem’s three stanzas begins with a
reiteration of this schema. If in the conventional world "merriness" produces
"tiredness," in bohemia merriness is the effect of tiredness; the way to
a bohemian temperament is through constant emotional expenditure. Yet the dynamic of
merriment through tiredness comes back on itself: once merry, the bohemians engage in more
tiring behavior (described in the ensuing stanza), which leads them back to the merriness
of the subsequent refrain.
Within the poem, the display of plenitude is at least as important as the management of
scarcity. While the one upholds bohemian identity, the other ensures the survival of the
individual bohemian. Other details of the poem follow this basic pattern of thrift amid
seeming profligacy. The speaker and her companion carelessly buy fruit
("somewhere") and give it away, along with their money, to an immigrant woman
whose tearful gratitude only serves to highlight their own transcendence of material
need—the difference of their bohemian poverty. But again, there is a careful, even
meticulous economy at work here. The show of giving has an important ideological dimension
but also serves as a refinement away from crude hoarding toward the precise measure of
needs—a perfect economy of no waste. Hence, "you ate an apple and I ate a
pear"—enough to sustain them and neatly designate their sexual difference and
the "pagan" nature of their relationship. Again, money for such a pair has only
the utility of gaining them access to further circulation, this time on the subway.
Yet this achieved synthesis of bohemian ideals and economic mastery suffers at least
one moment of rupture. At the close of the poem, their distance from the world of needy,
hoarding capitalism (immigrant and bourgeois) tidily established, the lovers look
trustingly out over the rising sun, a scene belonging by rights to the realm of bohemian
lyrical ideality. Yet here they find themselves confronted with a gaudy, " dripping .
. . bucketful of gold." As an index to the speaker’s psyche, the image registers an
unconscious preoccupation with opulence beneath her willed frugality. As a commentary on
the bohemian project the poem describes, it signals a certain fragility at the core.
Subliminal threats notwithstanding, "Recuerdo" is overwhelmingly successful
as a classic bohemian idyll. The stakes get higher-and the balance more
difficult—when Millay figures a more explicitly sexualized female speaker.
"MacDougal Street," from the same high-bohemian period, enacts the failure of a
specifically sexual economy. As with "Recuerdo," the poem begins with a bohemian
rhythm of pure circulation: "As I went walking up and down to take the evening
air." But while the "back and forth" of the ferry ride is reasserted with
every new stanza, the systematic nature of this speaker’s stroll—and her control of
the situation she inhabits—is lost after the initial moment. Yet, though it fails to
put her in charge, the pattern of circulation that the line sets in motion does generate
bohemian desire.
As I went walking up and down to take the evening air
(Sweet to meet upon the street, why must I be so shy?)
I saw him lay his hand upon her torn black hair;
("Little dirty Latin child, let the lady by!")
The women squatting on the stoops were slovenly and fat,
(Lay me out in organdie, lay me out in lawn!)
And everywhere I stepped there was a baby or a cat;
(Lord, God in Heaven, will it never be dawn?)
The fruit-carts and clam-carts were ribald as a fair,
(Pink nets and wet shells trodden under heel)
She had haggled from the fruit-man of his rotting ware;
(I shall never get to sleep, the way I feel!)
He walked like a king through the filth and the clutter,
(Sweet to meet upon the street, why did you glance me by?)
But he caught the quaint Italian quip she flung him from the gutter;
(What can there be to cry about that I should lie and cry?)
He laid his darling hand upon her little black head,
(I wish I were a ragged child with ear-rings in my ears!)
And he said she was a baggage to have said what she had said;
(Truly I shall be ill unless I stop these tears!)
Unlike "Recuerdo," whose title ("I remember") implies the speaker’s
narrative control, "MacDougal Street" places its speaker
at the mercy of a defining urban context. She, too, is remembering, but tormentedly and
against her will. The use of a double voice conveys the speaker’s psychic oscillation from
the bed where she lies to the details of the street, with the clear sense—which the
title underscores—that this place has a magnetic hold on her. While an encounter with
the object of her desire is a psychologically obvious fixation, the event is
overwhelmingly defined by its setting. What is the significance of MacDougal
Street?
The chaos which at first seems to emanate from the lovesick mind of the speaker is, on
closer inspection, an objective chaos of the street itself. Dirty children, squatting
women, babies, cats, pink nets, rotting fruit, filth, clutter—MacDougal Street is
rank with sensuality. More specifically, it is an overflowing market of female sexuality.
Not simply "slovenly and fat." the "squatting" women of the stoops are
implicated in a grotesque fertility by virtue of the teeming babies and cats surrounding
them. The central sexual figure is the child, appropriately called a "baggage,"
both saucy child and wanton woman. Apart from her seeming flirtation with the loved man,
this child brings the market explicitly into playas she "haggl[es] from the fruitman
of his rotting ware." The sequence in this stanza suggests that she does so in
response to the "ribald" allure of the carts. Yet given her poverty and her
bartering skill, we must also assume that she is engaged in a routine struggle to feed
herself. In a sense, the poem conflates poverty and explicit female sexuality, implying
that it is "dirty" immigrant women who must inhabit the marketplace of physical
need—of "fruit-carts and clam-carts."
And yet the distance between the women of MacDougal Street and the privileged bohemian
speaker is tenuous. The poem works very hard to make the separation: she is
"shy" and susceptible to nervous illness; her affective life is safely
privatized within parentheses, just as her experience is itself recalled from within a
domestic seclusion, and her fullest embodiment comes in the form of a wish to be a cool
corpse, separated. by death and rich fabrics from poverty and desire. But where the
equally privileged man "walked like a king" through MacDougal Street, casual and
condescending in his interactions, the female speaker moves in an agitated horror of
contamination.
When the speaker expresses the direct wish to be "a ragged child with
ear-rings in [her] ears," it is with the assurance that such an identification is
ridiculously far-fetched. And yet, the child is the speaker’s most direct link to
MacDougal Street; though a "dirty, Latin child," she is clearly the speaker’s
sexual surrogate. Her multiple marks of class, ethnic, and generational difference serve
to render the identification safe, but they also represent a fantasy—albeit a highly
ambivalent one—of sexual freedom without sexual consequences. A child, she is more
gamine than woman, whatever the content of her "quips." Moreover, life on the
market being a foregone conclusion, she can work it aggressively to her own advantage.
Where the speaker is condemned to waiting for the loved man to do more than "glance
[her] by" out of fear of her own descent into MacDougal Street sexuality, the girl’s
relation to him is uncomplicated by either implications for her identity or consequences
for her actions.
As we have seen, the "shawl-covered" immigrant "mother" of
"Recuerdo" served to enhance the transcendent status of that poem’s lovers. But
the sexualized women of "MacDougal Street" have only a precariously inoculatory
effect for this speaker and the quality of her relation to her love object. Though the