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Edna St. Vincent MillayA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Edna St. Vincent Millay packed performance venues for readings of, most often, her sonnets, which weaved a progressive feminine sexuality with classic allusions and formal poetic meter. She did not write sonnets exclusively, but it is the form for which she is best known. Her biographical page on the Poetry Foundation states that, like fellow poet Robert Frost, “Millay was one of the most skillful writers of sonnets in the twentieth century, and… was able to combine modernist attitudes with traditional forms creating a unique American poetry.”
Her choice to write in a fixed form provided sharp contrast to the modernist free verse of contemporary poets such as Hilda Doolittle (aka, H.D.), Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude Stein. Millay’s sonnets, while modern in their sensibility and perspective, adhered more closely to the public expectation of how poetry should sound, which is to say, rhymed and metered. Also, she constructed a kind of bridge in which the lofty or high-toned diction of the poetry of the previous century shared space with Millay’s modern wit and feminist ideals.
Though published in 1931, the poem “Not In A Silver Casket Cool With Pearls” is part of Millay’s body of work that represents what people refer to as the Roaring Twenties, a post-war new age in which women could move more freely in the world as sexual and intellectual beings, without being defined or restricted by traditional roles.
By Edna St. Vincent Millay
An Ancient Gesture
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Conscientious Objector
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Ebb
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I Will Put Chaos Into Fourteen Lines
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Lament
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Song of a Second April
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Spring
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Courage That My Mother Had
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Spring And The Fall
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Travel
Edna St. Vincent Millay