Modernist Women's Poetry and the Sentimental Tradition (Part 4)

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From the course by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Modern American Poetry

42 ratings

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Modern American Poetry

42 ratings

Twelve experienced faculty members from across the United States present their analyses of ground-breaking modern American poets in richly illustrated video lectures. The course highlights both major poets—from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson through T.S. Eliot, H.D., Amy Lowell, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, and many others—and influential movements. The course mixes historical overview with close readings of individual poets and poems. Most courses give only one instructor’s point of view. This one matches the diversity of US poetry with lectures by a score of talented faculty. They bring their special perspective to the material while also presenting a coherent view of more than fifty years of US poetry. Throughout the course the lectures are illustrated with vivid images of the events, people, and places mentioned in the poems themselves. Readings by both the poets themselves and experienced faculty highlight the texts. On screen displays of text and quotations make it easy to follow the material. This is a course that takes advantage of the medium to bring you sights and sounds that would be difficult to incorporate in classroom lectures.

From the lesson

Module 2

The Difference Women Made

Modernist Women's Poetry and the Sentimental Tradition (Part 1)6:40

Modernist Women's Poetry and the Sentimental Tradition (Part 2)9:08

Modernist Women's Poetry and the Sentimental Tradition (Part 3)8:09

Modernist Women's Poetry and the Sentimental Tradition (Part 4)5:45

Modernist Women's Poetry and the Sentimental Tradition (Part 5)9:32

Modernist Women's Poetry and the Sentimental Tradition (Part 6)4:02

Meet the Instructors

Cary Nelson
Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences
English Department

[MUSIC]

Lowe and Ransom's claims that this poetry lacks intellect are particularly

ironic in Millay's case because her sonnets explicitly address the issue of

women's intellectual equality.

In fact, her popular sonnet, you will be sorry for

that word serves as a veritable response to Ransom and the new critics.

You will be sorry for that word!

Give back my book and take my kiss instead.

Was it my enemy or my friend I heard?

What a big book for such a little head!

Come, I will show you my newest hat, and

you may watch me purse my mouth, and prink!

I shall love you still, and all of that.

I never again shall tell you what I think.

I shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly.

You will not catch me reading any more.

I shall be called a wife to pattern by; and some day when you knock and

push the door, some sane day, not too bright and

not too stormy, I shall be gone, and you may whistle for me.

>> The poem is playful but leveling in its critique of dominant gender and

sexual ideology.

The husband's word against his wife is cheerful and well-intentioned.

What a big book for such a little head.

In contemporary terms, we might call this a micro-aggression.

A casual, seemingly benign exchange that makes women's subordination plain.

This husband is no tyrant.

But, his paternalism is a betrayal of the modern companion at marriage,

which presupposes a partnership of equals.

This man loves his wife, but he does not respect her.

He has married her, but he does not consider her his intellectual equal.

Written in the wake of women's suffrage,

the poem is a testament to the unfinished business of women's equality.

Was it my enemy or my friend I heard, Millay's speaker asks.

A question that highlights how the ongoing battle for women's rights and

equality will need to be fought at home as well as on the streets.

Millay's response to her husband's insult is surprising.

She does not counter his prejudice, but instead plays into his feminine fantasies.

Give back my book and take my kiss instead, Millay's speaker responds.

Come, I will show you my newest hat.

And you may watch me purse my mouth and prink!

This cunning performance of femininity, sweet and sly,

as Millay puts it, is also a bravura display of the reason and

intellect that she is being denied by and now withholding from her husband.

Millay, we can plainly see, is the better reader in this marriage.

Like Ransom,

her husband remains duped by the prettiness of Millay's little girl things.

Although critics today largely reject Ransom's misogyny,

there is still substantive debate about whether Millay's sonnets are sentimental.

For instance, in her landmark feminist study,

Sentimental Modernism, Susanne Clark defends the work of Millay and

her contemporaries against the new critics.

Clark demonstrates how invectives, like Ransom's, were motivated

by broader anxieties over the literary academy's changing cultural status.

According to Clark, quote,

the modernist's new critics used aesthetic anti-sentimentality to make distinctions,

to establish a position of authority against mass culture.

Mass culture was a feminized enemy, they saw as powerful and dangerous.

However, although Clark revalues Millay's poetry,

she nonetheless agrees with the new critics that it is sentimental.

Clark emphasizes Millay's emotional expressivity and

accessibility, values, which she claims,

placed Millay in direct opposition with modernism's difficult poetry.

Clark writes, in the age of Elliott, defined by the failure of relationship and

the anti-heroics of the poetic loner, Mallay was writing most of all about love.

She was writing in a way that invites the reader in,

that makes community with the reader and tries to heal alienation.

Clark's sentimental modernism is thus strikingly similar to Lowell's

feminine movement a half century before.

Like Lowell, Clark considers Millay to be emblematic of a sentimental tradition,

extending back to the 19th century and running counter to modernism.

But it's difficult to reconcile this sentimental vision of Millay,

with the fierce intellectualism that runs throughout her poetry.

My reading of, You will be sorry for that word, did not highlight connection or

community within Millay's poetry, but rather a struggle for power and freedom.

[MUSIC]

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