A Few Figs from Thistles: Edna St. Vincent Millay—“Constant only to the Muse” and Not To Be Taken Lightly

Abstract

A Few Figs from Thistles (1920) has been received much differently than Edna St. Vincent Millay’s other poetic work.  Scholars repeatedly describe this volume as “light verse,” an impression that, I argue, is misinformed.  This mischaracterization of Millay’s Figs from Thistles is not only due to the literary and cultural challenges faced by women modernist writers of the 1920s, but also because of the volume’s difficult production history, including her original publisher’s poor business practices and the resulting interruption in her early poetic output.  The material record—unpublished correspondence with close friends and poets Arthur Ficke and Witter (Hal) Bynner, as well as working manuscripts—shows that Millay was creating the poetry that we know as Figs from Thistle together with poems that span a larger portion of her oeuvre, including several poems that would appear in the Pulitzer-winning The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1923), a volume typically read as the product of a markedly more “developed” or “mature” Millay.  However, as I demonstrate in this article, Millay’s legacy cautions against critical approaches that rehearse unchecked readings, and her concerted efforts to “revise” Figs from Thistles and its reception further highlight the hazards of discourses largely informed by the conceptual attractiveness of poetic maturation.