Today is George Washington’s birthday. I expect he would be weeping to see the caliber of the man who is now president and is engaged in destroying the federal government and our democracy. Imagine tossing out a highly qualified director of national intelligence and replacing him with a totally inexperienced loyalist who will purge the CIA of anyone who does not display loyalty to Trump, not the Constitution. Imagine putting loyalists in charge of every department whose job is to gut it.
On a happier note, it is the birthday of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Garrison Keillor wrote about her on his daily “Writer’s Almanac.”
It’s the birthday of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (books by this author), born in Rockland, Maine (1892). She was raised by her mother, who supported the family by making wigs and working as a nurse. By the time she was 14, she was publishing poems in the children’s magazine St. Nicholas. Her mother couldn’t afford to send her to college, but when she was 19, she entered a poem called “Renascence” in a poetry contest hoping to win the large cash prize. Her poem didn’t win first prize, but when she recited it at a public reading in Camden, Maine, a woman in the audience offered to pay for her to go to Vassar College, and Millay accepted.
At Vassar, she was the most notorious girl on campus, famous for both her poetry and her rebelliousness. Vassar’s president, Henry Noble MacCracken, once wrote to her: “You couldn’t break any rule that would make me vote for your expulsion. I don’t want a banished Shelley on my doorstep.” She wrote back, “Well, on those terms I think I can continue to live in this hellhole.” She moved to Greenwich Village after college, and most of the men in the literary scene fell in love with her, including the critic Edmund Wilson, who proposed to her and never got over her rejection.
Millay wrote poems about bohemian parties and free love in her collection A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), and she became one of the icons of the Jazz Age. When she gave readings of her poetry, she drew huge crowds of adoring fans. She recited her poetry from memory, delivering the poems with her whole body. Many critics considered her the greatest poet of her generation. The poet Thomas Hardy famously said that America had produced only two great things: the skyscraper and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. She became the first woman poet to win the Pulitzer Prize, in 1923.
Millay wrote, “My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends — / It gives a lovely light!”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I love George Washington. If you haven’t read Washington by Ron Chernow, you’re missing a real treat.
George Washington meets Edna St. Vincent Millay
Would George have been quite fond
Of Edna’s rhyming sound
Had Washington been ’round
A hundred years beyond?
He did enjoy the ladies!
I read a story once and don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not, but I hope it isn’t. It goes like this:
Shortly after George Washington became President, he was to address the Congress. When he entered the room, they all stood. He told them to sit down, that in this country, there were no kings.
Tell that to Trump and Bill Barr and Bill Gates and the Waltons and Mike Bloomberg.
And Edna!!! She was magnificent. Here, one of her best, though there are so many great ones.
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.
And here, another:
I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity, —let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.
Of Loyalists and Royalists
The loyalists
Are Royalists
The jokers to the King
The honest men
Will never win
The Loyal Royal thing
If I am not mistaken, it’s spelled Royalusts in Prince Andrews family
“most of the men in the literary scene fell in love with her”
Millay and Simone de Beauvoir; in my estimation, any who wouldn’t fall in love with the likes of these hasn’t a brain in his or her head or blood in his or her veins.
I would argue just the opposite.
Burning at both ends doesn’t sound very faithful or monogamous to me.
Edna was not enamored of monogamy.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/02/22/edna-st-vincent-millay-polyamory-love-letters/
“I will be the gladdest thing Under the sun! I will touch a hundred flowers And not pick one.” -ESVM
Any man who WOULD fall in love with her like is asking for heartbreak.
Depends, doesn’t it, SomeDAM, on the man and what he seeks. People differ enormously. I had older friends–he a gay man and she a lesbian–who were married and the best of friends and truly life partners for decades. But they weren’t sexual partners. They married because people, in those days, expected young people to do that. They did what worked for them. And that’s OK. I have two sets of friends who have been in polyamorous relationships for decades. They long, long ago worked out their jealousy issues and are quite happy. And that’s OK too. I know another couple who long ago decided that they were sexually incompatible. They are both heterosexual and have occasional flings. They have been together for decades and love one another profoundly.
Sartre proposed to Simone de Beauvoir. She laughed at this. But they were lovers and the best of friends for their entire lives. Each acted, for the other, as the primary sounding board, as audience and amanuensis. They are buried together.
Perhaps Edna was happy with “touching a hundred flowers and not picking one”, but I doubt most men or women she had relationships with were.
And jealousy would undoubtedly eventually rear its head for most involved in such arrangements.
Millions of years of evolution are hard to overcome with “cool, calm rational” thinking.
They will be the most jealous things under the sun
I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick one!
Edna St. Vincent Millay, a romantic and free thinker, way ahead of her time
way ahead
But not ahead of Neil Young’s: Better to burn out, than to fade away, my my hey hey
My my hey hey
Rock and roll is here to stay
It’s better to burn out
Than to fade away
Just like Edna Saint Vincent Millay
Since we bring up Neil Young and free thinking in one breath’ perhaps we should call him Jung. How would Carl Jung have penned Neil Young’s hit song?
My my hey hey
Sigmund Freud is her to stay
It’s better to analyse, I would say
Life is better thataway
I believe it’s spelled anal-ize in Freud’s case.
“The anal stage is the second stage in Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychosexual development, lasting from age 18 months to three years. According to Freud, the anus is the primary erogenous zone and pleasure is derived from controlling bladder and bowel movement. … These stages are focused on erogenous areas.” — from Wikipedia
Freud is an interesting case. My take: he wasn’t that smart, but he had incredible determination. He was a junkyard dog who wouldn’t stop worrying a bone once he had latched onto it. He understood a few things. One was competition in inter-family dynamics. Another was forced suppression of desire. Yet another was the universality of desire. And these he worried into a ramshackle system stuck together with duct tape. He lived in a time when most people weren’t educated and the educated few could create whole systems with little check on their megalomania. He had so many crazy ideas. Weaving, he said, was created by women as a symbolic matting over, healing, of the pubic hair to hide the shame of castration. Crazy stuff that he enforced among his disciples. No dissent allowed! But for all that craziness, he nonetheless created much of the intellectual air that we breathe. It’s difficult for us to think at all without his concepts–repressed desire, wish fulfillment, sublimation.
The unconscious mind. Interestingly, there were others, following shortly on him, who claimed that the unconscious mind did not exist. Sartre, for example. But the Freudian idea has stuck to the extent that we can’t unthink it. It’s part of our mostly unexamined intellectual inheritance now. Philosophy often has this kind of afterlife. Of course, the contemporary version of the Freudian unconscious is a mechanical one. What used to be referred to as the unconscious is, to the cognitive psychologist, the automatic functioning of a lot of below-the-radar-of-consciousness machinery in the brain that does automatic processing and sends to conscious awareness anything that needs attention. Hey, leaves rustling. Might be a jaguar! But Freud was onto something about dreams that the cognitive psych folks aren’t, I think, fully grokking yet. In some states, the walls between the automatic stuff and the conscious stuff break down. In dreams, in states of creative ecstasy (from which the trope of the Muse, of possession by a creative spirit, of inspiration, come from. Don’t disturb her when she’s inspired. She’s just breathed in a god.
Freud is an interesting nut case.
Fixed.
an interesting nut case. agreed. But again, it’s amazing the extent to which people use, think with, his concepts all the time without often realizing this.
It’s really hard to say who was nuttier, Freud or the people who went to him for “treatment”.
It might be a tossup.
The astonishing thing is the hold he had over intellectuals for such a long time. But one shouldn’t be amazed, I suppose. There is a lot of this faddishness, even in science. Lucretian/LaPlacean materialism and Behaviorism have afterlives in the default views of a lot of scientists, even as physics has moved way, way past these.
Interesting basket case” also works
Freud speculated and wrote so much that he was bound to get something right by pure chance.
The idea of the unconscious mind wasn’t original with him, but he certainly was the one who popularized the notion. And as I mentioned, it has been resurrected, in contemporary cognitive psychology, as the automatic mind not accessible, usually, to conscious inspection.
In college, I read Freud’s book on interpretation of dreams. Man oh man, did that guy speculate and write a lot.
What a complete waste of time that book was.
My experience as well. A classic case of seeing everything through one distorting lens.
You are a better man than I am, then, SomeDAM. I wasn’t able to read all of On the Interpretation of Dreams, just bits and pieces. Bored me to tears. But I’ve read a bunch of other work by Freud, in bits and pieces, and Jones’s adulatory biography, and a lot of Freudian critics. I’ve never been impressed by the quality of Freud’s thought.
The real question to the historian is why. Why did a person so fiercely independent in her day see monogamous relationship as a restriction and multiple sex partners as a freedom? Some today are seeing the multiplicity of partners as a doormat for the Epsteins of the world. What can we say about the monogamy of her time that motivated Millay to have her ideas? Or was it just Millay?
It seems impossible to dismiss her as a singular flash in the intellectual pan of the Jazz age. We remember our writers, artists, and political thinkers because they resonated with an audience. Herein lies the importance of social and intellectual history. The zeitgeist calls. It teases us to understand the myriad of attitudes that swirl about to produce our times.
RT,
I expect she found domestic life confining. She was in love with a woman but that relationship was forbidden.
Nailed it, Diane.
She undoubtedly found domestic life unacceptable. The interesting thing to the historian, of which you are certainely one, is why her age and subsequent readers have found her poems resonant. This is the path to that aspect of the zeitgeist. I suspect that the resonance is based on the shared negative perception of the cult of domesticity. Hence her continued popularity among those who do not wished to be defined narrowly.
One of my favorite Millay poems is “The Poet and Her Book.”
I searched for it online but only found bios with that title.
Maybe she was just trying to live up to her name: Mi-lay.
Simone de Beauvoir addresses your question, RT, which is a good one. Here’s how she saw marriage in her time: You are expected, as a young woman, to be looking for a husband, someone to take care of you. And so, at the very time when you are young and lacking discernment and incapable of making as momentous a decision as choosing a life partner, you meet someone at random from among your small circle of acquaintance and, having been taught a Romantic ideology about fate and the soul mate and the love that lasts for ever, you imagine that this person is THE ONE and marry this person you barely know (heck, you don’t even know yourself yet–you are callow and unformed), and it’s at best a struggle and at worst a disaster, and you give up your freedom of action and self-direction. That’s how she saw it at the time.
That’s how many now see it. It’s interesting that marriage has declined so much in Europe–that there are so many young people choosing to be nonmarried partners. I recently read that ONLY 22 PERCENT OF AMERICAN HOUSEHOLDS, NOW, ARE NUCLEAR FAMILIES. This is far, far, far from what people think the situation is.
And, RT, Americans today tend to have no historical perspective on this. The isolated nuclear family in the suburbs is a relatively recent phenomenon, historically. It really came into its own with the creation of worker’s cottages by capitalists during the Industrial Revolution, where a husband and wife lived with the kids, and he went off to work, and she kept the house, but they were isolated from others. Before that, people, since forever, mostly lived in small villages or tribes with lots of extended family, and there was a lot of sharing of labor–in the fields, of childcare, etc. People got up in the morning and stepped out of the wigwam or igloo or clay-and-wattle hut or whatever, and there everyone else was, ready to share the day’s activities.
People have a tendency to think that however others happen to live their lives in their culture is THE WAY, and that any other is aberrant. They are surprised to learn that of the 1,231 societies listed in the Ethnographic Atlas (1998), 588 were frequently polygynous, 453 had occasional polygyny, 5 were polyandryous, and only 186 (15 percent of all human societies that we know about) were officially monogamous.
Very interesting, as usual. I always appreciate your comments. Gives me something to unpack.
And then there’s the Mosuo:
Hi Diane. I work in the public high school that Milay attended. One of our English teachers recently found some of her unpublished poetry in some old yearbooks. Our library is to be dedicated the “Edna St.Vincent Milay” library. Pretty cool for a little town in Maine!
Amazing! I bet some scholars of Millay will be descending on your high school.
I bet those are worth a lot.
Unpublished works by Millay!!!! That’s wonderful!!!!!! Can you share? I had a friend who worked for the Wellesley College library. There, they discovered some letters that revealed that Elizabeth Barrett Browning had a Jamaican ancestor, which explains the darker skin that led Robert Browning to call her “My Little Portuguese.” Thus the title of her book, Sonnets from the Portuguese.
Years ago, a friend of mine was going through a box of $1.00 books at a used bookstore in Rochester, New York. She ran across, there, a biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins with notes, throughout, in the margins, by its previous owner, T. S. Eliot!!!
But my favorite story of this kind is about the fellow in Kansas, of all places, who was going through the attic of a deceased relative and found a trunk full of handwritten manuscripts written by Martin Luther!!! They had belonged to a German immigrant Lutheran pastor in the family.
I found a copy of Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” owned by the great salon singer Sophie Tucker. Not as exciting as TS Eliot, but I was thrilled. I met her when I was about 7 and she was visiting neighbors in Houston.
!!!!!! That’s freaking awesome!!!!!!
Sophie Tucker!!! xoxoxoxo!!!!
I found a copy of the Cat in the Hat the other day when I was cleaning out the basement. Nothing special, not autographed by Dr Seuss or anything but it looked very old: tattered, with even a little mildew.
I think it might be worth something.
Should I be excited?
“At Vassar, she was the most notorious girl on campus…”
Thinking the same might have been said of this blog’s host during her time at Wellesley. Kindred spirits?
I bet they never guessed how blogonious Diane would turn out to be.
The differences: she was a famous poet.
I edited the school newspaper.
She was promiscuous. I never was.
Those are the differences, but straying beyond the four corners of the text, there are similarities? ; )
Well, Diane, there is still time for both.
In this, I think, they are kindred spirits: both are courageous. People with this fierce will–forces of nature.
Absolutely!
Cannot recommend enough this newsletter from historian Heather Cox Richardson, containing her daily reflections on our moment in time in the history of our country:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-22-2020?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoyMjY3NDg2LCJwb3N0X2lkIjoyODgzMTksIl8iOiJLMWpweCIsImlhdCI6MTU4MjQ3MzI1NCwiZXhwIjoxNTgyNDc2ODU0LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMjA1MzMiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.OA8kGqJCgc8Dsh8cJh97gCd3Ol39ErNVhEcxBAPwd24
“February 22, 2020
Heather Cox Richardson
A lot of folks have been asking me lately if America has ever been in such a crisis before and, if so, what people in the past did to save democracy.
The answer to the first question is yes, it has, three times, although only once was this bad. In the 1850s, the 1890s, and the 1920s, oligarchs took over the nation’s government, controlling the White House, Congress, and the courts.”
This note by Richardson is profound. Great historical perspective. Smart lessons drawn from that perspective. Are we seeing the darkness before dawn?
This is what Republicans fear. They can see the changing demographics of the country. That’s why they have embraced the Trump anti-immigrant theology: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/22/bernie-sanders-latinos-young-voters-nevada-116752
Republicans will either change or establish a dictatorship or, in a generation, they will disappear.