Favorites » Her Blog
-
Millays Poetry in A Greenwich Village Context--by Nina Miller
-
Mar 24, 12:36pm
1 review
•http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poet...
-
...Such dramatic national success had tangible effects on Millay's status among New Yorkers, naturally enough. Yet in this fact we also glimpse the dynamic circuit in which New York took cues from the national culture even while dictating most of its terms. Millay had an enormous literary and personal influence among the New York literati. Greenwich Village regarded her "with awe" even before her arrival there, on the strength of one passionate poem; John Peale Bishop and Edmund Wilson, young poets and literary editors at the middle-brow journal Vanity Fair, made it a personal mission to bring her work before a wide reading public; Genevieve Taggard and the other editors of the high-art little magazine Measure took Millay as their unofficial poet laureate; Countee Cullen, favorite son of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote his undergraduate thesis on Millay and pursued his professional career along distinctly lyrical and traditional lines; and even Dorothy Parker, embodiment of midtown urbanity , described her own significant (and significantly national) career as a matter of following Millay's example. In short, in the era literary criticism has taught us to see as dominated by avant-garde formalism, Millay's passionate sonnets were widely admired and imitated by writers of all kinds...
|
Online now
Add her as a friend >
