Going Long: Is It Just for Football?
by Carol Gillette Bachofner
Edna St. Vincent Millay was “discovered” at a party at the Whitehall Inn in Camden, Maine, where her sister worked, playing piano for guests. Vincent was asked to recite a poem for the guests. From memory, she read her poem “Renascence,” all 214 lines of it. Ms. Caroline Dow took an immediate liking to Vincent, became her patron, assuring her college education and exposure as a poet. Millay won the Pulitzer in 1923, the first female American poet to do so.
Over the 100+ years since her first public reading, Millay’s poetry has intrigued scholars and the poem-reading public. This poem has been highlighted and studied by academics and critics. However, it seems that the first part of the poem has emerged as “the poem,” with the remaining lines faded into the background in terms of close reading and interest. Most admirers of Millay can quote the first several lines verbatim.
What of the rest of the poem? Why do the remaining lines not get studied or memorized as do the first ten lines? In my opinion, there are three reasons for this.
The sheer length of the poem (214 lines) makes memorization difficult, let alone the heaviness of Millay’s messaging. Contemporary readers on the whole do not generally seek to memorize poems, let alone poems of great length. It is, therefore, easy to let the first stanza BE the poem. Of course scholars are more willing to investigate the other stanzas, contemplate meaning, and marvel at Millay’s sense of detail and use of language, a mix of plain and classical terms and expressions. However, Millay was of blue-collar beginnings and one would hope that her cohort would dig deeper into the poem, derive meaning for their own blue-collar lives, and not stop at the initial offering of the opening. We live in a microwave society, a “get in, get out” kind of approach to most everything. So why not choose others of Millay’s poems to memorize, study, enjoy? Poems like “Recuerdo” or the “fig poems” which are easier to memorize and derive meaning from. Long poems are receding in value to readers. I blame the hurry-up we live in for why we choose small bit poems (haiku, tanka, haibun for example) over poems of heft.
The poem is a happy thing at the first stanza, with readers in awe of what she is seeing as she views the world from the top of Mount Battie, in the Camden Hills. One sees a pristine landscape, beautiful and still. One sees a young girl in love with place and inspired by it. As the poem progresses, however, the world seems to darken as does the poem. Modern readers of poetry tend to want the happy parts to contrast the current dark scenes of commercialism and ecological desecration. I would go so far as to say that Millay warns of this in her final stanza, particularly the final four lines:
The world stands out on either side No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,—
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat—the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.
Although the poem addresses Millay’s own self-blame,
All sin was of my sinning, all
Atoning mine, and mine the gall
Of all regret. Mine was the weight
Of every brooded wrong, the hate
That stood behind each envious thrust,
Mine every greed, mine every lust.
we are quickly moved toward our complicity. It is far easier therefore to give little and cursory attention to stanzas that accuse or focus light on ills, easier even to avoid the moral challenges this poem presents.
3. We are slaves to what’s new and shiny: the latest poet, the young poet, new ways of constructing poems (sonnets—who reads or writes them now?). Out with the old! Out with anything from the last 25 years! Do teachers outside of Maine teach Millay or her contemporaries? Does THIS poem get recited at slams or read at open mics? It is far easier and more comfortable to go small, take the amuse-bouche of poetry and move on to the flavor du jour.
I believe that it is of little help for readers to ignore looking more carefully at what “Renascence” offers. That means confronting how we live our lives in the sense of it being its own doppelgänger of thrill and ill. We do this by way of poets who have been willing to be the mirrors to society, its delights and shortcomings. Millay does this over and over in most of her poems, perhaps spurred on by the successful acceptance of this long poem that launched her voice into the universe.
Carol Willette Bachofner is author of 8 books, her latest Every Place I Look, women with embers at their feet (Main Street Rag, 2025), a finalist for a Maine Literary Award. Her unpublished chapbook, A Place For What’s Missing, was a 2026 finalist for The Poets Corner Chapbook Contest, and her poem, “Spring,” is a recent finalist in the inaugural Vincent Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Dawnland Voices, An Anthology of Writings from Indigenous New England (University of Nebraska Press). Find her at carolbach.substack.com.
