Collected Sonnets
COLLECTED SONNETS $3.00 By HARPERS
WHEN Edna St. Vincent Millay published her early poetry she was the voice of the new ‘postwar’ generation of young women, asserting rebelliously the values of healthy twentieth-century youth against those of the dying Victorian tradition. The voice was fresh and insurgent and passionate — a very frank and fearless young voice, ‘speaking out’ spontaneously about youth and love and lust and the joys and despairs of living; speaking, too, with a richness of phrasing and a verbal felicity reminiscent of Elizabethan warmth and Keatsian glamour, with an admixture of modern cynicism and honesty which gave the conventional symbols and vocabulary a contemporary cut. Something very characteristic of the age certainly recognized itself in Miss Millay, and she became the most-read poet of the period. She became, indeed, a public figure, with a reputation for romantic passion and frankness and ecstasy to live up to. Her later poetry has suffered from that fact for, instead of developing with the age, it has remained the poetry of the youth of the ‘twenties,’ while the romance becomes somewhat diluted with empty rhetoric, the ecstasy a little stiff in the joints.
Yet this collection of sonnets is the work of a minor poet who impresses a personality on everything she writes, who is often a most accomplished technician in the sonnet form, and whose best examples will always find a place in any anthology of romantic verse.
E.D.
JOHN H. BRADLEY
JOHN WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN
ELIZABETH DREW
WILSON FOLLETT
JOHN GASSNER
EDWARD WEEKS