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Edna St. Vincent MillayA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Published in 1922, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem "The Spring and the Fall” appears within the context of Modernism. Modernist poets aimed to bring poetry into the gritty real world of the early 1900s. They moved from grandeur and isolation. For them, poetry wasn't about conveying lofty, rapturous themes but about how words could express a range of ideas or human emotions. "The Spring and the Fall” aligns with Modernism in its attitude toward love. Love isn’t glorious but glum. It’s painful, with the speaker declaring that the man "broke [her] heart, in little ways (Line 12).
Another aspect of Millay’s poem that joins her to Modernism is fragmentation. Modernist poets like T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein emphasized the world's brokenness in their dislocated poems about society, people, and objects. Millay speaks to fragmentation as her speaker’s heart is broken or fragmented. She also breaks apart the division between spring and fall by announcing that there’s "much that’s fine to see and hear” in both seasons.
Yet Millay’s emphasis on rhythm and traditional form separates her from Modernists who preferred harsher sounds and covert rhythms. Eliot’s famous Modernist poem
By Edna St. Vincent Millay
An Ancient Gesture
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Conscientious Objector
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Ebb
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I Will Put Chaos Into Fourteen Lines
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Lament
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Not In A Silver Casket Cool With Pearls
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Song of a Second April
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Spring
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Courage That My Mother Had
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Travel
Edna St. Vincent Millay