A Study Guide for Edna St. Vincent Millay's "An Ancient Gesture"
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A Study Guide for Edna St. Vincent Millay's "An Ancient Gesture" - Gale
09
An Ancient Gesture
Edna St. Vincent Millay
1954
Introduction
Edna St. Vincent Millay was called the greatest lyric poet of the twentieth century by her admirers. An Ancient Gesture
was one of her last poems, appearing in print after her death in the collection Mine the Harvest (1954). Significantly, the poem uses the myth of Penelope and Ulysses, as from Homer's Odyssey (in which he is called Odysseus), to investigate the relationship between men and women. Millay was drawn to classical literature, which she could read in the original languages. She was particularly influenced by classical lyric poetry and by the Renaissance and nineteenth-century lyric. An Ancient Gesture
turns the myth from Homer upside down, focusing on Penelope's grief in her marriage rather than on her role as the perfect wife. The poem, spoken probably by a housewife in Millay's era, offers a meditation on Penelope's tears at her husband's absence, in ways the tears of all women, and then compares and contrasts them to the tears of men, as from the person of Ulysses.
This poem has been anthologized in recent years for its feminist theme and skilled lyric evocation of grief. Millay wrote it at the end of an illustrious and famous career, by which time her poetry was well known and loved from her numerous reading tours and radio broadcasts. She became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, but by the late 1930s she was in disfavor with the modernist critics who rejected her sources in earlier lyric traditions. Such critics admired poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound who were experimenting with intellectual poetry in free verse; they found Millay to be a sentimental woman writer lacking depth. Though Mine the Harvest, her last collection, was praised after her death, her poetry was neglected until the 1990s, when her reputation was revived by feminist critics. An Ancient Gesture
can also be found in a current edition of Collected Poems: Edna St. Vincent Millay (1981) or in Selected Poems: Edna St. Vincent Millay (1991).
Author Biography
Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, on February 22, 1892, the eldest daughter of Cora Buzzell and Henry Tolman Millay. She was given her middle name in honor of St. Vincent's Hospital, in New York City, where her uncle's life had been miraculously saved. Henry Millay was a salesman and a gambler. Cora, who was a free spirit and had literary ambitions herself, had three daughters in four years, with Norma and Kathleen following Edna. She taught the girls poetry and music when they were small. Cora finally sent Henry away when he could not support them, then moved to Rockport, Maine, and found work as a practical nurse, raising the children alone. Cora was absent a lot, and the girls were unusually independent, writing poems and stories and putting on plays. They grew up on