During the 1910s and ’20s, Edna St. Vincent Millay achieved the kind of fame that was unusual for a poet then and unthinkable now. Before the age of the movie star, she became America’s first starlet.
It was at a party in Greenwich Village, in the spring of 1920, that the critic Edmund Wilson first encountered Edna St. Vincent Millay in the flesh. Wilson, a well-bred graduate of Princeton, was a fan of the twenty-eight-year-old poet’s work—he’d taken to reciting one of her sonnets in the shower—but he was, in her physical presence, overcome.
What the diaries do reveal is that this supposedly ethereal creature was in fact solidly earthbound. As a teen-ager, Millay described the effects of hard domestic labor on her body ; later, rich and married, she wrote about the joy she felt “spading & pulling” in her garden. She tracked the changing seasons, dutifully recording the spring’s first bluebird and the comings and goings of herbs.
For all its precocity, the poem can also be understood as a young woman’s effort to reckon with the limitations of a stifling life in Maine. “Renascence” opens with the speaker gazing upon three mountains, like the ones Millay had been climbing all her life:I turned and looked another way,Straight around till I was comeWas three long mountains and a wood.
Only six months after graduation, Millay was once again close to broke. She was living with her sister Norma in New York, in a small, cold apartment on West Ninth Street; the pipes froze, as did the flowers Millay brought home to beautify the space. She was acting and writing poems, but the sisters often relied on male suitors to buy their dinners.
Even decades after Millay’s death, “Ungrafted Tree” was held in high esteem: the scholar Sandra M. Gilbert called it Millay’s “finest sonnet-sequence.” More recently, though, critics have tended to trip all over themselves to assure readers that they don’t consider Millay significant, or even a particularly good poet. There are several reasons for this overcorrection: an allergy to popular literature, reflexive misogyny, and, perhaps most important, the enduring influence of literary modernism.
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