My critical piece this month is on Edna St Vincent Millay's Collected Sonnets, an underappreciated artistic edifice that more or less echoes the heft of other sonnet collections (Shakespeare, Sidney, Petrarch, E.B. Browning). She starts as a formalist and stays there fairly much, somewhat varying rhyme schemes later on and writing a few tetrameter sonnets. Not much formal experimentation over a fairly long sonnet career.
However, the strength of her poetry gradually amps up until in the final sequences her insights become more and more subtle, penetrating and meditative. She writes extremely involving love sonnets and varies her background subject matter into ecological, evolutionary and geological musings.
Where she starts as a woman plagued by the male gaze and concerned with her own temporal physical beauty she gradually becomes an independent, assured and masterful poet.
She is a uniquely early 20th C figure, with some of her word choices looking backward to 19th C diction and her ideas and subjects (equal rights for women, sexual freedom, ecology) looking forward to the present day.
My focus in thinking about ESVM's Collected Sonnets is as a model and tutor for my own work. I'm thinking in terms of secondary aesthetic concerns (book layout, font, binding), organizational concerns (sonnet sequencing, numbering) and poetic effects (repetition within a single line, formalism, plain language usage, imagery, the tetrameter sonnet, refrain-like repetition). Her choices seem very deft and well-imagined and are instructive for my current sonnet project (80+ sonnets and counting.)
Her choices and consistency seem good models to ponder in arranging a book of sonnets. I really like her sequence of poems when she was living in a rustic house in the country. Her meditations in this section recall Wordsworth and Thoreau a bit, yet are unique rural observations.
I guess I should get started on writing my critical piece after a few admiring passes through those sonnets of Edna's I flagged for further enjoyment.
reading some of her biography, "Savage Beauty" by Nancy Mitford, I note that she called herself "Vincent" mainly, was extremely vain about her beauty and as she aged was very concerned about her perceived inability to attract young men. She also was concerned about her failing abilities as a poet. When she was working on the preface of the sonnets she veered between writing a complex history of sonnet-writing and soul-searching but finally wound up with a simpler, shorter preface. Her contemporaries snarked about her being reduced to producing "collections", as if producing a book like this was some sort of fault. I mean, come on - who could produce a book this beautiful then or now? Right, go ahead and try it and Good Luck!
ReplyDeleteWell, we all have our insecurities and critics. I wish there would have been someone to tell her, "hey, this is great stuff. people will be reading it in one hundred years! don't listen to detractors, just crank it out!