Construction Of Selfhood In Poetry: Edna St. Vincent Millay

541 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Poem analysis essay

Edna St. Vincent Millay has created complex as well as emotionally and politically charged poetry in her career. Her poetry is often considered expressive yet also indifferent by some critics. Yet, her skill with metaphor and other evocative poetic features bring us poems that are reflective of her self, and also ourselves as readers. By developing skilled metaphors for interpreting and developing her own identity as an author and for us as a reader, we are given a construction of selfhood. In this essay, I will analyze Edna St. Vincent Millay’s two poems; If I should learn, in some quite casual way, and What lips my lips have kissed in order to explain the meaning and presence of selfhood in lyric poetry. Through interpreting Millay’s poems, I will explain the construction of selfhood or identity in each poem through formal structures. Understanding selfhood comes with understanding one’s surroundings and how we are able to relate or compare ourselves to these surroundings. Edna St. Vincent Millay does a very complete job of bringing metaphor, narrative, diction and imagery to h...

Show More
Related

  • Summary Of The Poem 'Alter Ego' By Gwen Harwood

    848 Words  | 2 Pages

    “Who am I?” is the question raised by Gwen Harwood in her poem, ‘Alter Ego’. Gwen Harwood’s poems explore societal positions and expectations of women in the 1950s which are derived from her own experiences. Though most of her poems have an underlying theme of grief, loss, love and the passing of time, which is explored through her reflecting on her childhood, some are also about self-discovery. ‘Alter Ego’ and ‘The Glass Jar’ are two examples of poems about self-discovery. The 1950s wasn’t the greatest era for female creativity, might it be art or literature which is why most artists and writers sold their material under male pseudonyms as did Gwen Harwood.

    Read More

  • The Comparisson Between Edna Pontellier Character and a Poem

    982 Words  | 2 Pages

    In The Awakening, Edna Pontellier is a selfish character. She wishes to live her life the way she wants without anyone interfering. She did not start selfish, but grew selfish as her hidden desires were awakened. Her selfishness comes from her complete disregard for anyone’s happiness besides her own. Edna refuses to attend her sister’s wedding, describing the event as lamentable. Even if Edna did not want to attend, a wedding is for the bride and groom’s happiness. She is unable to compromise any of her own desires for the happiness of others. Edna’s own marriage was an act of rebellion for marrying outside of what was expected, and came with the titles of wife and mother. Edna abandoned her relationship without trying to resolve any difficulties with her husband before satisfying her needs. She does not discuss with him her unhappiness or seek his approval before moving to the pigeon house. She develops her relationship with Arobin only to fulfill her own physical needs.

    Read More

  • Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnet What lips my lips have kissed and where and why

    518 Words  | 2 Pages

    Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnet, “What lips my lips have kissed and where and why,” is about being, physically or mentally jaded, and thinking back to the torrid love of one’s youth. The “ghosts” that haunt her are the many lovers of her past; she’s specifically trying to remember them all. She recalls the passion she experienced and how there was a certain feeling within herself. Millay shows this through her vivid imagery, use of the rain as a literary device and by paralleling herself with a lonely tree.

    Read More

  • The Lady in the Pink Mustang

    1003 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...es her. The imageries of pink Mustang signifies her social class, while “Road” indicates her location as nowhere within a community. The commodification of her body means it can be touched in ways derogatory to her dignity whether she likes it or not because it is a saleable commodity that doesn’t belong to her. Her silver painted nipples identifies silver coins. Silver coins represent monetary value put on her body. Silver painted nipples also mean the attractive way in which a product is packaged. The poem also depicts the defiance of women against how she has been treated. She identifies man as the one that kisses away himself piece by piece till the last coin is spent. However, she cannot change the reality of her location, and temporal placement.

    Read More

  • What Lips My Lips Have Kissed by Edna St. Vincent Millay

    743 Words  | 2 Pages

    Edna St. Vincent Millay grew up in a small town in Maine. She was always encouraged by her mother to pursue her writing and musical talents. She finished college and moved to New York City where she lived a fast pace life pursuing acting and play writing. Her liveliness, independence, and sexuality inspired her writing styles and gave her poetry a freshness that no others had. She is famous for writing sonnets like “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why.” This poem holds many metaphors and symbols pertaining to how certain seasons make people feel. She compares the feeling of nature with her personal feelings of being alone after having so many lovers.

    Read More

  • Roles of Women in the Odyssey, Sakuntala and Good Country People

    900 Words  | 2 Pages

    The influential roles of women in the story also have important effects on the whole poem. It is them that press the senses of love, family care, devotion, and other ethical attitudes on the progression of the story. In this poem the Poet has created a sort of “catalogue of women” in which he accurately creates and disting...

    Read More

  • John Ashbery's April Galleons

    2550 Words  | 6 Pages

    John Ashbery, the great American modernist poet, achieved a fiscally small but artistically tremendous success with his book April Galleons, published in 1987; he won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry with his 1975 effort Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and won nearly unanimous acclaim from poets both domestic and abroad; this volume continues in the same stylistic vein as Self-Portrait, and furthers the deep and fragmented exploration of the themes which have fascinated him, as evidenced through his verse. This volume was both a stylistic departure and a thematic continuance from his earlier books, including the notable 1956's Some Trees and the subsequent The Tennis Court Oath. John Ashbery, in all these works and all the works following them (including his latest offering, Your Name Here) addresses several major topics, most notably the meaning of America and the myth of the American Dream, as well as the subjective human experience of consciousness, the unusual and fragmented sense of time and identification it produces; his approach is typified by a search for the truth and meaning of things, explored through series of abstract objects set into a fabric which creates a thick emotional density. Although a investigation of every poem in this book would be valuable and enlightening, for brevity's purpose only three will be selected: A Mood of Quiet Beauty, Insane Decisions, and Some Money.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Suffering Mirrored By Nikky Finny

    1261 Words  | 3 Pages

    The two poems best illustrate, through a reading put in a wider context of black suffering, Finney’s success in making the beautifully said thing intersect with the difficult-to-say-thing through her sharpened pencil (“Nikky Finney”), thus reshaping the present. The historical approach is necessary in order for given allusions to be situated in their social, political and cultural background. In order to escape intentional fallacy, a poet should relate his work to universal concerns. The application of the (auto)biographical-historical approach necessitates the investigation of some points: the relevance of the poet’s personal life and his/her poems; the expression of certain beliefs of the poet and his personal experience in relation to public concerns and beliefs of the time; the representation of historical figures in the poems; adequate depiction of the time/context of the poems (“Literary Criticism”); the poems as a reflection, a product of the time; the reformulation of actual events for special purposes; the difference between fictional representation and reality; the difference the time; understanding past events mirrored in the poems; and the impact of historical events/movements and literary works in formulating the poems.

    Read More

  • An Examination of the Complexities of Love in Millay's Poem, Love Is Not All

    532 Words  | 2 Pages

    It is said that Millay's later work is more of a mirror image of her life. This particular poem was written 1931, when she was thirty-nine. Unlike some of her earlier work this is not a humorous poem. It is very deep and meaningful.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Edna St. Vincent Millay's 'The Courage That My Mother Had'

    170 Words  | 1 Pages

    In the poem The Courage That My Mother Had by Edna St. Vincent Millay, the speaker explains the admiration he/she had for his/her mother’s courage. The author integrates strong imagery in order to fully explain the message that the speaker is trying to get across to the reader. In the first stanza, the speaker describes his/her’s mother as a “Rock from [the] New England quarried,” and later uses the same idea of a rock to describe the courage his/her mother possesses. What can be understood from the repetition of the image of a rock, is that the mother figure is as strong as the courage inside her. Another way we can see that the speaker truly loves their mother’s courage, is the fact that although he/she received a golden brooch that had previously

    Read More

  • What Lipps My Lips Have Kissed, And Where And Why

    467 Words  | 1 Pages

    In the poem “What Lips my Lips Have Kissed, and Where and Why”, Edna St. Vincent Millay elucidates that it is possible to feel alone in a relationship, and if a significant other doesn’t mean anything, then forgetting the details of a past romance is inconsequential: regardless of whether a lover is close or distant, a profound emptiness endures. Millay reaches this conclusion by first hinting in the title that the identities of the men are negligible— they all blend together and take a back seat to the woman’s desolation— as she uses synecdoche to refer to her past lovers as “lips” rather than people as a way of dehumanizing them; secondly, through melancholy imagery of ghosts which furthers the idea of an unseen force, or rather feeling, haunting her and beseeching attention, and she cannot be bothered to respond to these pleas, despite the fact that they “stir a quiet pain”, because it would do nothing to ameliorate her aloneness (line 6); and lastly, through the metaphor of a “lonely tree” whose boughs are “more silent than before” because Millay doesn’t specify that the tree was vibrant or prolific during summer or include any distinctive details about the birds: the focus is on the sense of solitude— none of the birds were special, but the woman misses having someone around to help foster the illusion that she isn’t alone, despite the fact that she is emotionally void (9-11).

    Read More

  • An Analysis of Millay's Poem, Renascence

    784 Words  | 2 Pages

    Although this section is the easiest to read, it sets up the action and requires the most "reading between the lines" to follow along with the quick and meaningful happenings. Millay begins her poem by describing, in first person, the limitations of her world as a child. She links herself to these nature images and wonders about what the world is like beyond the islands and mountains. The initial language and writing style hint at a child-like theme used in this section. This device invites the reader to sit back and enjoy the poem without the pressure to understand complex words and structure.

    Read More

  • My Life Stood A Loaded Gun

    1820 Words  | 4 Pages

    Emily Dickinson is known to be a poet of great renown. Even after many decades, her work continues to be a major influence in English literature. Her poems are known for their breaking of the standard poetic rules and dives deep into self-conscious of the human mind and society’s views of right and wrong. In particular is poem 754. Much of Emily Dickson’s poem, “My Life Stood – A Loaded”, places a large of amount of emphasizes in violence and narrates her time with her ‘Owner’. The speaker in this poem is subjected to the imposed gender dynamics of 19th century and tries to find an alternative around this. The speaker of the poem experiences powerful emotions and acts on them during the duration of the poem.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Parturition By Mina Loy

    731 Words  | 2 Pages

    This, in fact, is an example of “dynamic decomposition” of which the speaker claims she understands nothing. The ironic contradiction of form and content underlines the contradiction between the women’s presentation of her outer self and that of her inner self. The poem concludes with the line “’Let us go home she is tired and wants to go to bed.’” which is a statement made by the man. Hence, it “appears to give the last word to the men” but, in reality, it mirrors the poem’s opening lines and emphasises the role the woman assumes on the outside as well as her inner awareness and criticism. This echoes Loy’s proclamation in her “Feminist Manifesto” in which she states that women should “[l]eave off looking to men to find out what [they] are not [but] seek within [themselves] to find out what [they] are”. Therefore, the poem presents a “new woman” confined in the traditional social order but resisting it as she is aware and critical of

    Read More

  • Walt Whitman Poetry Analysis

    1080 Words  | 3 Pages

    This is an autobiographical type of poem in which the author, Walt Whitman, is also that persona, who in developing this type of poetic work, and surpasses the traditional limits of the “self.” The captivating and attention-grabbing aspect of the poem is the free verse technique or style, which significantly makes the development of the “self” a calming task while celebrating a personal life. The persona is described as a lover of nature, and incorporates three sections of the self-personality that include “I,” “me,” and the “soul”. Whitman’s use of sexual or bodily imagery and his use of grass as a central image and metaphor create a poem that is bold and uncommon for his era. A unique element of the poem is that the poet declines the basic conventions and rules of poetry. Whitman’s poem doesn’t follow any specific rhyme scheme, nor does it have a particular beat count or structure. Whitman still manages to successfully represent and replicate smooth flowing thoughts and ideas from the mind to the paperwork, making it a revolutionary form of poetry.

    Read More

More about Construction Of Selfhood In Poetry: Edna St. Vincent Millay

Open Document