A Portrait of St. Vincent

I.

While looking for a particular photo of Edna St. Vincent Millay on Google, I came across the following.


I was more than a little befuddled but also amused enough to find out why this photo has been associated with an early twentieth century, now relatively unknown poet like Millay. It appears that someone quoted the last six lines of "I will put Chaos into fourteen lines" in her blog.

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
And keep him there; and let him thence escape
If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape
Flood, fire, and demon--his adroit designs
Will strain to nothing in the strict confines
Of this sweet order, where, in pious rape,
I hold his essence and amorphous shape,
Till he with Order mingles and combines.
Past are the hours, the years of our duress,
His arrogance, our awful servitude:
I have him. He is nothing more nor less
Than something simple not yet understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good.

Because we, in the academy, have largely conspired to decide that Modernism is what happened in literature in the first half of the twentieth century, Millay's sonnets nowadays go largely unread, even though I think their grappling with the unknown and intractable speaks to the somewhat more macabre tastes of contemporary readers. I suppose then (20s-40s) it was considered as silly to write sonnets as it is now. Fatal Interview 9:

When you are dead, and your disturbing eyes
No more as now their stormy lashes lift
To lance me through...as in the morning skies
One moment, plainly visible in a rift
Of cloud, two splendid planets may appear
And purely blaze, and are at once withdrawn,
What time the watcher in desire and fear
Leans from this chilly window in the dawn...
Shall I be free, shall I be once again
As others are, and count your loss no care?
Oh, never more, till my dissolving brain
Be powerless to evoke you out of air,
Remembered morning stars, more fiercely bright
Than all the Alphas of the actual night!

II.

I fancy myself a rather sophisticated reader of poetry with sophisticated tastes in music and a sophisticated approach to the interpretation of both "kinds" of verse. I'd reaffirmed this fact with my recent discovery of St. Vincent (better known to her birth certificate as Annie Clark) and counted it a great triumph. This morning the New York Times stepped in to remind me how bourgeois my tastes really are.