5.10: Edna St. Vincent Millay's "I, being born a woman and distressed" (1923)
Millay represents both a continuation of poetic traditions and a new approach to appropriate subject matter for women’s poetry. Like many female poets of the early part of the twentieth century, Millay appears at once to straddle two worlds: on one hand her poetry shows great technical skill, which permits her entry into the ranks of so-called serious poets, while on the other hand, her verses show a lightness, a frankness, and a freshness from which a poet like Dickinson would retreat. For Millay and other female poets, as for their African-American contemporaries like Countee Cullen, it was often necessary to embrace traditional poetic forms even as their subject matter was decidedly modern.
One of three daughters of a divorced mother at the turn of the century, Millay’s early successes resulted in the unusual opportunity to attend Vassar College in her early twenties, and these social and educational connections proved highly useful to the young writer. A gifted playwright as well as a poet, Millay was a member of the experimental theatre group, the Provincetown Players, for whom she frequently wrote while also composing several books of poetry. As a sometime expatriate in the 1920s, Millay liberally combined traditional poetic forms and contemporary subjects in her verse, prose, and drama. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923, for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver , Millay was both a critically and a commercially successful writer.
"I, being born a woman and distressed"
Please click the link to access this poem on Poetry Foundation's website.
Reading and Review Questions
- How does Millay’s choice of the sonnet form distinguish her work from that of other Modernists such as Eliot? Also, why do writers like Cullen and Millay experiment with the sonnet form?
- Millay is one of the first American poets to write candidly about female sexuality. How does Millay’s poetry reflect the attitudes of Modernism in relation to female sexuality?