Millay, “Rendezvous”
Read the following selections from The Oxford Anthology of American Poetry, ed. D. Lehman, 2006.
Poems about sex and love:
Millay, “Rendezvous” (p. 390)
Duncan, “The Torso (Passage 18)” (pp. 649-51)
Wilbur, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” (pp. 668-9)
Levertov, “The Mutes” (pp. 687-8)
Hall, “When the Young Husband” (pp. 847-8)
Rich, “Living in Sin” (pp. 868-9)
Haas, “Misery and Splendor” (pp. 970)
How do some of these poems about sex and love project images and ideas about femininity and masculinity? Discuss two or three poems.
Sample Solution
In her introduction to the new Selected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Holly Peppe states, “No woman poet of her generation was as adored, widely read, or quoted as Edna St. Vincent Millay.” Millay’s ascension to the prominence Peppe portrays, which has been well-documented by several biographers, could have been a Golden Age Hollywood movie tagline: “Young woman of modest resources from rural Maine skyrockets to stardom.” Millay became a sought-after star among Greenwich Village literati not long after receiving widespread acclaim for her poem “Renascence” when she was only twenty-one years old.
