Edna St. Vincent Millay

Stranger, pause and look;

    From the dust of ages

Lift this little book,

    Turn the tattered pages,

Read me, do not let me die!

    Search the fading letters, finding

    Steadfast in the broken binding

All that once was I!

 

From the “Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay”

 

Millay has a way of hitting things on the nose. I’m really enjoying her “Collected Poems” and am reading on the side “Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal” as a part of grad school strategy to not only read more poetry but to figure out how to read (and understand) it.  Meanwhile I’ve snatched up two stanzas from her poems to kick start two of my own novels (attributed, of course).

 

The first essay in “Millay at 100” argues that she is underappreciated in the sense that critics don’t think she’s worth the time to analysis but academics apparently enjoy quoting her. Perhaps that a good sign that her poetry is well written, evocative, and easy to understand. For most people ease of understanding is a sign of good writing, but I suppose critics need difficult writers to justify their profession.

 

I chose this quotation above because it speaks to me personally, and to anyone else out there being an author, regardless of your publishing success. Anyone’s work could, basically, molder away, become an “ex-poem” in the sense that no one reads it anymore. The statistical chance of anyone achieving the literary longevity of Austen or Dickens is depressingly low, and probably getting lower with 3000 new published books each year crowding for attention, drowning each other out.