Word: millay
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...that whoever writes them was not developed up to the point of appreciating poetry. You published a review of Ogden Nash's last book with a picture of John Chamberlain and his wife, and the story of Mr. Chamberlain's literary rise. You even said that Edna Millay wasn't so good! Ho, hum. Does your reviewer like Mother Goose...
...your issue of Nov. 5, on p. 69, under the caption of Books, your reviewer describes the voice of Edna St. Vincent Millay as "clear but excitingly husky." With this description I beg to differ, having heard Miss Millay on her trip to Dallas several years ago and also several times over the radio....I recall the sweet clear soprano of her speaking voice distinctly. In her lines from The Buck in the Snow especially, her voice registered high treble. In fact, to me, it was "excitingly soprano...
Both Reader Hallam and TIME are right. When broadcasting, Poet Millay reads her poems, especially her children's verse, in a childlike treble. But just as often her voice varies with her mood to tragic huskiness. Sometimes her throat plays unfortunate tricks. Last fortnight in Detroit, where she gave a reading, Miss Millay was repeatedly interrupted by coughing in the audience. Each time she would pause, roundly upbraid the coughers. Toward the end of her reading Miss Millay herself was seized by a fit of coughing, to the undisguised glee of her audience...
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...