Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

I’m a fan of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry, so when I ran across a quotation of a few lines from this book, I decided to check it out. It’s an eighty-five-year-old stage play in verse, recounting the after-dinner talk of Ricardo, a wealthy sophisticate with a townhouse in Greenwich Village, and his six dinner guests. Since the far-ranging snippets touch on many political and social issues of the time, eight years into the Great Depression and on the eve of World War Two (with war already underway in China, Ethiopia, and Spain), I was prepared for much of the dialogue to be dated. This was less the case than I expected (sad to say).
Instead, the weakness lies in the characters. They are types, not persons: A stockbroker, a poor poet blindly defending Stalin, a frustrated fine artist who gets by on portrait commissions, a writer of short stories, a priest, and a young advertising copywriter. The exchanges, particularly heated between the broker and the poet, yield few surprises, and I didn’t notice any character development.
I was fascinated that Millay assembled an all-male group. This struck me even before the extended disquisition on the foibles of women that opened Part Two.
As for the writing: some of it, particularly the soliloquies written as sonnets, was fine. Millay displays a gift for aphorism. In addition to the lament that Babel is here and now that led me to read this, there is this on the economy: “I’m beginning to wonder what the hell / We buy that’s half so precious as what we sell.” Or this: “Hypocrisy is not to be despised, it is the pimp of Empire, but it presupposes / The existence in the community of a spiritual force for good, that must be courted and betrayed / Into connivance with evil before the planned step can be made.” As contemporary as the run-up to the Iraq War.… (mais)

RENASCENCE by Edna St. Vincent Millay, was, I know, considered a groundbreaking classic in its time, and a treasured book of my mom's, but sorry, Mom. I read the whole book in about forty minutes. I just couldn't relate to all the gloom and doom, and the stilted, archaic rhyming that, to me, was reminiscent of Poe. For me it was just barely an 'okay.' I have my mother's 1917 hardback (first?) edition of the book, published by Harper & Brothers. Content-wise I couldn't recommend it. But I wonder if it's valuable.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (mais)