Men & Women & the Publishing Industry

This is a poet who stood at an interesting crossroads. It has long been an acceptable — even a mandatory — activity for women to write poetry, from medieval courtiers to the blue bloods of the Back Bay. But it was a much later development when the ban was lifted on women actually publishing poems.


Looking back at the most renowned female poets, a lot of it is pretty mushy and predictable. That's what there was a market for, and there undoubtedly was some misogyny in thinking that's all that women would be able to write. In some ways, we still have that lingering prejudice - women can write children's fiction, romance novels, helpful how-to books, but we leave the really powerful, deep writing to the XY crowd. Witness what's been nicknamed "Franzengate," after all the hoopla about Jonathan Franzen's new book "Freedom" and how so-called Great American Novelists lauded by the media are invariably men.


Edna St. Vincent Millay was a poet, translator, critic who could definitely go toe-to-toe with any of her peers, regardless of gender. But she still was stuck in some of this late-Romantic tradition even though she was eight when the 20th century rolled around. So there's a lot of flowery language and decidedly non-Modernist leanings in her work even though her personality and philosophical bent are very much in the dark, depressing and recognizably contemporary mood.


Exhibit A: this sonnet that has all the outward forms of courtly love songs that extend from the Tudor court to Miley Cyrus. But there's a different flavor here, something that's more A.E. Housman than Anne Bradstreet, something inconsolable and irrevocably interior.

"What lips my lips have kissed"

Edna St. Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts to-night, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply;
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain,
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.


Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone;
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.