Travel

Millay works both in traditional and experimental forms. Traditional forms incorporate meter and rhyme, and Millay is most known for English sonnet structure. She utilizes traditional forms to convey political and philosophical topics connected with gender and sexuality. Millay is most known as a skilled sonneteer. Formal poetry utilizes meter (a controlled arrangement of stressed or unstressed syllables) and incorporates end-rhyme scheme, either consecutive or patterned.

Many also consider Millay a part of the Modernist literary movement. Modernist literature often reveals experience in unconventional ways such as stream of consciousness and deviation from linear narrative (MasterClass. “Modernist Literature Guide: Understanding Literary Modernism—2022.” MasterClass, MasterClass, 14 Apr. 2021). Many credit the poet Gertrude Stein with encapsulating this approach with the phrase “a rose is a rose is a rose.” When one repeats the word “rose” enough times, the mental picture of a rose begins to morph.

Although Millay is most known for traditional form, she experiments by returning to and diverting from it, especially with the traditional English sonnet style in both line count and meter. As with “Travel,” the rhythm, juxtaposed with end-rhyme, is subtly off-kilter and never-ending. Time is linear in “Travel” (day and night are defined), but she disrupts the Realist standard of specific and true-to-life detail. Place is a concept with no true identity of its own.

Other poets associated with Modernism are T. S. Elliot, William Carlos Williams, and e. e. cummings. Cummings, who also experimented with Cubism in written form, was the most experimental with line placement, use of white space, compressed wordage, and line design. The result is a disjointed and nonlinear voice that cannot be recited orally.

Throughout her publications, Millay remains traditional in form. She uses this structure as foundation to address issues impacting women in her lifetime. Her work is not always to-the-letter in a particular form, but it provides and contains the emotions associated with loss, conflict, desire, identity, equality, war, and oppression.

Millay’s voice and poetry have influenced and paved the way for other female poets to address social values and sex-role stereotypes, with the stress on the nuclear family construct. In the 1950s, Beat poet Diane di Prima found herself in New York Bohemia, ahead of her time for being unmarried and having multiple partners (and children from them). In the 1960s and 1970s, poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton grappled with and attempted to dismantle the social female construct, institutionalized motherhood (and the disconnection from it), and holistic mental health care for women.