Word: millay
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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WINE FROM THESE GRAPES-Edna St. Vincent Millay-Harper...
...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...
...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...
University of Wisconsin (Madison, Wis.) Rufus Cutler Dawes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LL.D. Dean Guy Stanton Ford of the University of Minnesota Graduate School . . . . . . Litt.D. Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Litt.D. Secretary of Labor Perkins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LL.D. Henry Charles Taylor, member of the Laymen's Foreign Mission Inquiry. . . . . . . . . . LL.D...