April is National Poetry Month!

[cerusee]

I have a string of major assignments due one after another, and I don't have the energy to hunt down anything new, so I'm overloading with Millay.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Desolation Dreamed Of." Interesting sentiment from a social butterfly, no?


Desolation dream of, though not accomplished,
Set my heart to rocking like a boat in a swell.
To every face I met, I said farewell.

Green rollers breaking white along a clean beach...when shall I reach that island?
Gladly, O painted nails and shaven arm-pits, would I see less of you!
Gladly, gladly would I be far from you for a long time, O noise and stench of man!

I said farewell. Nevertheless,
Whom have I quitted?--which of my possessions do I propose to leave?
Not one. This feigning to be asleep when wide awake is all the loneliness
I shall ever achieve.

Comments

[mikkeneko.livejournal.com]

I never get tired of Millay.

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

Obviously, neither do I.

Sometimes I feel a little self-conscious about it, but...she's my favorite poet for a reason. I've never found another poet's extended body of work so accessible and comprehensible and meaningful to me.

[okaasan59.livejournal.com]

I haven't been commenting but I've really been enjoying your poetry posts.

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

I'm glad! I don't expect people to comment on all of them, but occasionally I worry that it feels like spam. Especially when I get boring and post the same poets over and over again, because I don't have thirty different favorite poets.

This is the first time in three years I've managed to do this so consistently. If I plan to keep it up, I'm going to have to get some new material!

[okaasan59.livejournal.com]

I especially love the Millay poetry. Can you recommend a good anthology of hers?

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Selected Poems, edited by Colin Falck, Perennial Classics, 1991.

It's organized as chronologic excerpts from the original published volumes of poetry, with the standard title/first line index in the back. The introductory essay gives a nice sense of her place in 20th century poetry history (and why she's relatively obscure now) and how her own style developed, and elements to look for in different periods of her life. Although I tend to read by flipping through and looking to see what catches my eye, I really appreciate having the order of the poems be chronological, not alphabetical, so that I can catch the thematic/stylistic connections of any given poem.

I am also very fond of Edna St. Vincent Millay: Collected Sonnets, but I wouldn't start with that unless you have a particular passion for the sonnet form. She was a genius at sonnets, and I love reading them, but I wouldn't have been as interested in Millay to begin with if I hadn't first seen her flexibility with other forms.

[okaasan59.livejournal.com]

Thank you!