Poems About Real Women

Romance, rebellion, feminism, fame, controversy– all these adjectives encompass the meteoric rise and bright burning life of the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. From her early teenage years, until her death, Millay wrote some of the strongest, most unconventional poems about life, love, and women that can be found today. At the same time hailed for her skill and criticized for her nonconformist stance, the impact of Millay's work on the world of poetry cannot be denied.

Born in Rockwell, Maine, in 1892, Millay, along with her two sisters, was raised almost entirely by her mother. A rather “unorthodox” woman herself, Millay's mother divorced her husband (quite unusual for the time) and raised her daughters to be strong, independent, outspoken women with a large appreciation for classic literature. Her unshaken support undoubtedly helped catapult Millay to the dizzying heights that she reached. As a teenager, Millay wrote one of her most famous poems, “Renascence”, which gained her instant recognition in a local contest, and while it did not win the first prize, it brought her great praise, and eventually linked her to a scholarship at Vassar University.

Millay's romantic life is always much discussed, not only because it was a common topic of her poetry, but because of its unconventionality, particularly for its time period. Millay was openly bisexual, and carried out love affairs with both women and men, sometimes simultaneously. She received and rejected several marriage proposals before settling on Eugen Jan Boissevain, a self-proclaimed feminist, who dedicated the rest of his life to advancing Millay's career.

Awards and accolades literally showered Millay during most of her life. In 1923 she became the third woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her poem “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver”. She was also an accomplished playwright, having written a play commissioned by none less than the Metropolitan Opera House. She also wrote and published prose under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd.

Millay's poetry is a mixture of sonnet and free verse. Though some (particularly the Modernists) consider her to be quite a formal poet, and, indeed, her topics of love, romance, life, and death, can be considered such, there is nothing formal about the way she addresses these topics. Millay wrote about love in a new, unconventional way, that many had not seen before. In her poems, the woman is often portrayed not as simply a lump of flesh pining away for some lost love, but as a 'player' of the game. The women within her poems are often cold, evasive, cynical, and even push their loves away from them rather than draw them near. A review of her poetry once stated, “How neatly she upsets the carefully built walls of convention which men have set up around their Ideal Woman...!”

“What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, / I have forgotten” she writes in one untitled sonnet, and in another claims “O love, as summer goes, / I must be gone, steal forth with silent drums”. The subjects of these poems project love as a real woman might feel or suffer from or reject it. Rather than presenting us with yet another Lady of Shallot who mourns herself to her grave, Millay gave women strength, power, and dimensionality within her poetry. However, she remains realistic about this power. Though some of her poems maintain a happy and cheerful tone (“We were very tired, we were very merry”), many of them end rather with tears or melancholy (“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.”). Yet arguably, this is what gives her poems strength. They are real, they are raw, they are powerful. Let us be glad that Millay had the courage to write them, and the rest of us have the opportunity to read, enjoy, and relate to them.

What lips my lips have kissed
Recuerdo
Renascence