Books: Sister Singers

WINE FROM THESE GRAPES—Edna St. Vincent Millay—Harper ($2).

NOT MINE TO FINISH—Genevieve Taggard—Harper ($2).

Sappho was thought unladylike not so much because of her personal habits as because of the poetry she wrote. But Sappho has many a sister in these westering years. Since poets generally discarded their priestlike function for that of self-mindreaders, women have flocked to join the profession and some of them have gone to the head, or near it, of their respective specialties. Last week two U. S. lady poets, whom repute places high above the ruck of feminine poetasters, smote their lyres in unison.

As usual, hurrying U. S. citizens paused to give ear to Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Some were impressed by Publisher Harper’s proud announcement that two editions of her book had been exhausted before publication date, but many more looked forward to drinking in another recital of carefully muted chamber music. Many a reverent reader, mindful of the Olympian thunders her Fatal Interview brought down,* doffed his hat before he tiptoed into the audience. But plain readers soon discovered that Wine from these Grapes was a good but by no means a great performance.

Such readers are often made uneasy by the linguistic vagaries of contemporary poets. But Edna St. Vincent Millay is still a lucid poet. Though it is a modern belief that poets, to be audible at all, must speak in an original voice. Poet Millay’s originality lies not in a surprisingly exact vocabulary but in the fainter, pleasanter flavor of language reminiscent of poetry-at-large. Though her studied verse sometimes sounds too consciously traditional, such classic artifice as the following will have charm for most readers:

Oh, what a shining town were Death

Woke you therein, and drew your breath,

My buried love; and all you were,

Caught up and cherished, even there.

Those evil windows loved of none

Would blaze as if they caught the sun.

Woke you in Heaven, Death’s kinder name,

And downward in sweet gesture came

From your cold breast your rigid hand,

Then Heaven would be my native land.

But you are nowhere: you are gone

All roads into Oblivion.

Whither I would disperse, till then

From home a banished citizen.

A poet but a lady poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay writes not only valentines but epitaphs in lines less mighty than aristocratic. Even when she compares a woman’s breasts to wild carrot and onion blossoms or describes the mating of dinosaurs, she contrives to make neither an uncouth nor an arresting gesture. At the sight of a new sonnet sequence critics may hitch up to their typewriters and look for unstruck keys, but ordinary readers will prefer Poet Millay’s less pretentious quatrains:

Man, with his ready answer,

His sad and hearty word,

For every cause in limbo,

For every debt deferred,

For every pledge forgotten,

His eloquent and grim

Deep empty gaze upon you,—

Expect no more from him.

Though Poet Genevieve Taggard’s popularity cannot be compared with Poet Millay’s, the critical fraternity takes her no less seriously. As a poet she is neither so ladylike nor so lucid, as her sister singer. She does not belong to what Critic Max Eastman calls “the cult of unintelligibility,” but readers may puzzle over some of her idiosyncrasies of expression. No maker of enameled verses, she titles her book with a phrase that tells why: Not Mine to Finish. Poet Millay’s lyric sadness is resigned; Poet Taggard’s is savagely indignant. When she writes To an American Workman Dying of Starvation, she lets literary language go hang:

Swell guy, you got to die.

Did you have fun?

I guess I know you worked.

I guess I saw you.

It got yon just the same.

Say it with flowers.

So long. We got the breaks. But we’ll be seeing you.

There’s a little job we got to attend to up here, first.

And her opinion of literary poets is more forceful than polite:

. . . I will not touch your “beautiful”—

Carve beauty more and rant her less . . .

The English language is no whore—

What are you making rhyme-schemes for?

The Authors. Though “Edna” is a poor start for a poet’s name, “Edna St. Vincent Millay” goes trippingly on the tongue. Like her name, Poet Millay is a “natural.” She began writing verse as a child, got it published in St. Nicholas; at Vassar she was the shining literary light. At 31 she had won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (with The Harp-Weaver). The same year she married Eugen Jan Boissevain, whose first wife was her college idol, the late Feminist Inez Milholland. When Musician Deems Taylor was commissioned to compose a U. S. opera, he chose Edna St. Vincent Millay as librettist. Petite, bobbed-haired, vivacious. Poet Millay spends most of her time with her husband at their Austerlitz, N. Y. farm. A frequent lecturer and reciter of her own poems, she reads in a clear but excitingly husky voice. Now 42, she has produced 14 books, no children.

Genevieve Taggard is a Westerner (born in Waitsburg, Wash.) who has wandered all over the world—Hawaii, California, France, Manhattan—is now teaching English literature at Bennington College, Vt. An able critic as well as a poet of metaphysical perceptions, she has written the standard life of Poet Emily Dickinson (The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson). Of moderate size, she gives an impression of classic stature. Married, she has one daughter.

* Sonnets in Fatal Interview (1931) were compared to Petrarch, Shakespeare, Milton, were called ”immortal.”