Books: Edna Millay

Edna Millay

She Ranks Sixth or Seventh Among Contemporary Versifiers

Having won the Pulitzer Poetry Prize, having changed publishers and been married during the Spring and Summer as well as having been operated upon for appendicitis, Edna St. Vincent Millay doubtless now enjoys her convalescence with something like complacency. I cannot, somehow, think of her as complacent, however. This delicate, elfish woman is as restless, as full of vitality as a wheat field on a windy day.

Edna Millay was graduated from Vassar. Stories of her undergraduate days are not free from anecdotes of temperament displayed. She was notably successful, then, however, with her verses, and her prize-winningpoem, Renascence, was heralded by the critics as an extraordinary performance for one so young. From college she migrated to Greenwich Village. The contrast between Washington Square and her home town of Rockland, Me., was great; but it did not disconcert her. She soon became a legend. Her poetry was widely read, her charms widely heralded. She was a poet of renown and even more brilliant as a personality. Tiring soon, however, of the Bohemian life of the Village she went to Europe with her mother. There she stayed, as a part of the American colony in Paris; then, for a time, in England. This Spring she again sought America. When one saw her, she seemed frailer than ever. It was rumored that she was ill. She left town and sought the wilds of Croton-on-Hudson. Visitors to the colony there did not see her. She remained in seclusion. Then, with no warning whatever, this writer of passionate, free, gayly cynical love poetry, abandoned Croton for the hospital and was at the same time married to Eugene Boissevain, a young importer of Dutch extraction who plays an excellent game of tennis, dances gracefully and seems to appreciate the arts. What effect this marriage will have upon the poetry of Miss Millay is a question for the psychologists to ponder and time to answer.

Where does this brilliant young poetess rank among our present-day versifiers? Her lyrics are more moving to me than those of Sara Teasdale or Elinor Wylie; but on the other hand one can think of no woman poet who has quite achieved the breath and flashing brilliance of Amy Lowell. Miss Millay’s is a different gift. I should be inclined to rank her second, then, in importance among our women poets, and remembering Lindsay, Frost and Robinson, sixth or seventh among our contemporary versifiers. J.F.

Good Books

The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion.

UNDER A THOUSAND EYES—Florence B. Livingston Cosmopolitan ($2.00). Heather Davenway returns to her own particular Gopher Prairie —this time a town in Vermont—after a long absence in more metropolitan circles. She finds green trees and neighborliness—but also: gossip, spite, talebearing and the town’s incessant interest in the most personal affairs of its every inhabitant. At last, however, she finds the love of “a good clean man” and the discovery of certain kindly qualities in even the most intrusively neighborly of neighbors sufficient offset to Hampton Valley’s other drawbacks. A Main Street that dodges reality and lacks any brilliance of texture—but whose happy ending should delight all Babbitts.

WHAT TO TALK ABOUT—Imogene B. Wolcott—Putnam ($1.90). Post-graduate work for those whose careful perusal of The Book of Etiquette has taught them exactly what to do with an olive. What to talk about to Accountants, Brides, Clergymen, Dentists, Elderly People and so on down the alphabet. Jokes are inserted— oh, this is a sprightly manual! In fact one rapid reading should prove enough to furnish even the dumbest débutante with enough heavy verbal ammunition to entilade any sophisticated dinner table. Only—what does one talk about when one’s carefully prepared list of questions dries up? And why are no links provided between the reader and Mah Jongg devotees, grandfathers, zebra-trainers?

ERIS—Robert W. Chambers—Doran ($2.00). Eris, daughter of discord, was one of the aristocratic changelings that are always being born to fictional farmers. She wanted to go on the stage. ” Marry me,” said E. Stuart Graydon, one of those slick city chaps, ” and I’ll help you.” She did—only to find out on her wedding day that Graydon was a counterfeiter, wanted by the police. Graydon escaped his trailers by a hairbreadth —and Eris, thoroughly disgusted with country life in America, fled to New York. Barry Annan, young literary genius, found her penniless in Central Park, wrote up her life story for his newspaper—and then—oh, well, you know the rest—they fell in love and she made a howling success on the silver sheet and after all sorts of complications everything turned out happily. A typical Chambers novel— the perfection of timely, extremely readable trash.