Sex variant women in literature

In La Vénus des Aveugles (1903) “La Perverse Ophélie” and “Sonnet à une Enfant” are addressed to the same person, and they show Vivien struggling to spare both the other girl and herself the fevers of such an alliance as her second had been. This volume also reflects a more bitter struggle which would have remained an enigma except for Germain’s discreet sketch of what occurred during 1903. He describes the new beloved as endowed with a cameo profile, a keen if ‘exclusively practical’ intelligence, and a temperament in every respect different from Vivien’s. It is clear that he did not like the girl, and he attributes to her much of the suffering and catastrophe in Vivien’s later life, although he grants that the poet produced the greater part of her published work under the stimulus of the new association. She was, in fact, the Hélène de Zuylen de Nievelt who collaborated in the “Paule Riversdale” volumes, and to her (in part) Vivien dedicated several original volumes and her collected poems of 1909. No biographical data are discoverable, but the Hamlet and Ophelia references above, and the fact that Brumes de Fjords (1902), the first volume dedicated to her, was announced as translated from the Norwegian, suggest that she was from Northern Europe. (Her name, of course, sounds Dutch.) A difference in the dedicatory initials between 1902 and 1909 suggests that the girl may have married in the interval.

In 1903, Vivien was apparently just entering with delicacy and caution upon this new emotional adventure when Barney reappeared on the scene. Like all women who know themselves weak, says Germain, ‘Renée armed herself with a strong resolution’ not to see her old love. But Barney was not one to be “congédiée” at another’s pleasure. When Vivien, at the end of her endurance, left Paris and took refuge in her villa at Mitylene, wanting only peace, she was run to earth even there. (This may, of course, be a euphemistic version of the episode. It is not impossible that Vivien went to Greece by secret pre-arrangement with Barney.) In any case some weeks of renewed intimacy ensued of which La Vénus des Aveugles reflects the bitter and poisoned entrancement. To her tormentor Vivien writes, among much in the same key:

Full reaction came with return to Paris and to Violet’s grave:

Other poems in the same volume make it evident that at this time she longed for the courage to kill herself, and in reverie dwelt upon the death of both her current loves.

By 1904 she had apparently freed herself of the old entanglement and yielded to the inevitable ripening of the new. A L’Heure des Mains Jointes, published in 1906 but reflecting this emotional period, opens with the idealistic title poem:

This poem and many others in the volume have, indeed, a new simplicity, occasionally sacrificing to it something of her earlier verbal magic. They evoke the image of a soft-spoken, light-footed pale girl with tawny hair who turns to her for comfort and peace as well as reciprocating them. One sees, too, a garden above Nice, surrounded by pines and full of pale iris, for Vivien carried symbolism into daily life—violets for the first love, lotus and tiger lilies for the second, iris for the third. The love celebrated here seems complete and happy, combining passion with companionship, and it was during 1904 that Vivien tried to link her friend’s life to hers even in authorship with the “Paule Riversdale” experiment. From this year come three volumes under Vivien’s name and three or four of joint authorship, justifying Germain’s statement that this alliance was fruitful.

But the collaborative prose-poems, narratives, and verses were not well received. Of “Riversdale’s” Echos et Reflets the reviewer of poetry for the Mercure de France said merely, ‘Renée Vivien is no longer alone in evoking the glorious and tragic shade of Sappho.’ On L’Etre Double, one pseudonymous narrative, Rachilde’s total comment was:

Vivien’s own autobiographical tale, Une Femme M’Apparut, fared thus:

The last comment is particularly interesting inasmuch as Willy (the novelist Henri Gauthier-Villars, of whom more later) had called the heroine of La Passade “Mona Dupont de Nyewelt,” a name too like Hélène’s to be a matter of chance, considering his notorious penchant for including real persons in his fiction. He described her as a gamine given to roaming the streets of Montmartre at night and tossing pebbles through fanlights for sheer deviltry—altogether, far from innocent.

It may have been the critical cold douche of 1904 that kept Vivien silent during 1905 and restricted her output during 1906 and 1907 to a single volume per year, but it was more probably unhappiness. The drift of her personal life is not difficult to discover from poems in Sillages and Flambeaux Éteints of 1908. “Malédiction sur un Jardin” bids the flowers fade, since her love no longer cares to walk among them. “Vêtue” begs the beloved not to discard a gown, but

“Amata” voices that ultimate plea of the desperate woman which tougher spirits always take for hypocrisy:

That this time the defection was not hers, that she had at last attained to her own ideal of self-effacing constancy, seems to have saved Vivien from bitterness. Only one later poem is tinged with it, “Terreur du Mensonge,” in which her resentment is not for the defection itself but for the lie which sought to conceal it.

Was this lie perhaps responsible for the gender of “prends-la” above? For as was suggested earlier, the “ambiguë” Hélène may have married before the end of 1908. It is certain that, in that year, Vivien prepared the edition of her collected poems which she dedicated to her friend under the new initials. It is also known that she made an unprecedented visit to her family in England, and soon afterward attempted suicide with laudanum. One biographical note[29] mentions that during her last year she was suffering from “Basedow’s disease” (exophthalmic goitre), and such an affliction might seriously depress a hellenic worshipper of physical beauty. But it seems hardly adequate to have made her seek death, without the added burden of emotional despair.

Her later poems record increasing misery and loneliness, restless travel, “loveless loves” and premonition of death. From the three posthumous volumes come such titles as “Solitude Nocturne,” “Résurrection Mauvaise,” “Déroute,” “Vieillesse Commence,” “Détrônée,” and “Cyprès de Purgatoire.” Short quotations will suffice to convey their tone:

or:

or:

The Dream here was not, of course, such as comes with sleep, but that illusion of Love which she had pursued all her life. The final volume, Haillons, is filled with cries of pain and horror, of foreseeing the end and wanting it to come swiftly.

The known facts of her last year are gleaned from Colette’s Ces Plaisirs and from news notes following her death. She was living alone in her Paris residence, an “Arabian Nights dream” of luxury crowded with the trophies of her travels. Colette conveys vividly the macabre effect of rooms hung with gloomy colors and inadequately lighted by brown tapers; the exotic flowers and food and drink; and the unpredictable eccentricity of the hostess, dressed always in diaphanous black or violet, who might walk out in the middle of a dinner in response to mysterious summons from a nameless “Friend.” This figure was so anonymous and so capriciously tyrannous that Colette surmises she may have been the figment of an imagination already clouded by intemperate habits. It is known that the unhappy poet was drinking to excess, an indulgence particularly dangerous in view of her thyroid imbalance.

A few weeks before her death she was to appear in a tableau as Lady Jane Grey on the executioner’s scaffold, and wishing to enhance her effectiveness as the tragic heroine, Vivien put herself through a punishing regime of violent exercise, little food, and much alcohol. She made a brilliant appearance, but fainted on the stage and was carried home to bed. Soon afterwards, as the result of further drinking to escape black depression, she strangled while attempting to eat and was quickly stricken with pneumonia.[33]

It was at this point that, with the utmost secrecy, she joined the Church of Rome, as Violet Shilleto had done before her. Colette’s matter-of-fact surmise is that a dour and disapproving elderly maid was responsible for summoning a priest while her mistress was delirious, and Natalie Clifford Barney in the longest of her memorial poems to the dead girl agrees with Colette in implying external pressure:

But the consensus of popular opinion was that this was a deathbed repentance inspired by sheer panic.

It is possible, however, to trace in life and work hints which acquit the poet of mere faint-hearted apostasy from her devout paganism. The first is her friend Violet’s similar step, marked upon her ineradicably by her own remorse. Then there are the many “violette” poems celebrating the beauty and innocence of that first love, which were written steadily, except during the brief happy period of her third affair. There is also the parallel theme of guilt when her ideal of love was violated, as during her second liaison and her last reckless extravagances. There are even one or two tenuous religious allusions in late poems—“Chapelle,” “Chapelle de Marine,” “Dura Lex Sed Lex,” and there is Le Christ, Aphrodite et M. Pépin, a bitter prose satire on an age of scientific materialism which was giving only lip service to its deity. But more significant is Germain’s report of what was to him the most amazing aspect of her conversion—it was the concept of Mary the Virgin which drew her to the Roman Church. How little after all even her close friends comprehended the basic motivation of her life: a compulsive seeking for maternal tenderness.

To understand the odd finale to her story one must return to a phase of her life so far neglected—her many contacts with artistic and literary men of her day. The critics Charles, Droin, and Germain were her personal friends, Sansot, LeDantec and Brun her staunch allies. Her collector’s interests had gained her the friendship of Ledrain, curator of oriental antiquities in the Louvre, and her passion for music—she was an accomplished interpreter of Chopin—had won that of Gauthier-Villars, music critic as well as novelist, and of Saloman Reinach. One must also return to the second portion of Barney’s already partially quoted memorial poem:

“Ils” were her relatives, and it is true that she was buried at Passy beneath a slab bearing for identification only her father’s name, John Tarn. Immediately upon her death the quick-witted and practical Reinach, foreseeing attempts on the part of church, family and even some friends to suppress evidence of her emotional history, took possession of letters and unpublished manuscripts and deposited them in the Bibliothèque Nationale, with the stipulation that they should not be made public until after the year 2000 A.D.[35] It will, therefore, rest with another generation to compile the definitive record of her work and her essentially tragic life.

Some years later in Notes and Queries Reinach wrote the following informal tribute in response to an inquiry:

All the critics who grant her this superlative poetic quality agree that she has received nothing approaching her due recognition because of the lesbian element in her work. In view of the small number of persons in any generation who are tolerant of such love, it may be that she will never receive it.

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There remains little to mention in the way of variant French poetry, though occasionally some isolated chance-encountered fragment—like a sonnet to Hermaphroditus by Marguérite Yourcenar—stimulates a fruitless search for more of an author’s verse. The Mercure de France reported in 1902 Henry Rigal’s Sur le Mode Sapphique, of which Pierre Quillard’s review says that it was prefaced by a quotation from Pierre Louÿs: ‘When a loving pair is composed of two women, then it is perfect.’[37] The slim volume was made up of a dozen brief episodes laid in a dimly distant Ionic island setting, and recounted in antiphonal stanzas the love between Chrysea and Mnais. It was apparently a close imitation of Louÿs’s Songs of Bilitis, with Mnais in the more masculine role. It ends with a shepherd lad catching Chrysea’s eye one evening and piquing her imagination by dreams of “a stronger and better love.” Were it not for the title, says Quillard, one could well believe the amorous dialogue one between a girl and an éphèbe—an effeminate man.

The only other woman poet sufficiently variant to attract critical comment was Paule Reuss, noted by Clarissa Cooper in her Women Poets of the Twentieth Century in France. Reuss’s volume Le Génie de L’Amour (1935) was dedicated to her fellow poet Anna de Noailles, and is said “to breathe a pure idealistic love like that of Dante for Beatrice.” Cooper’s only quotation is:

This suggests a proud and ironic restraint to equal Natalie Clifford Barney’s.

Poetry—German

The first contemporary variant poetry in German was probably an item cited in Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch simply as: Plehn. Lesbiacorum Liber. 1896. As it is not listed in the German publishers’ catalog during the 1890s, it must have appeared in a periodical or as a part of some longer volume. The only possible author is a Marianne Plehn who produced a long monograph on geology during the same decade. Her interest in a field cultivated chiefly by men supports the assumption that her literary outlook was also masculine, and her rather labored Latin adjective would imply that her “Book of Lesbians” celebrated women of similar temperament.

In 1898 considerable notoriety attended the publication of Auf Kypros by Marie Madeleine (Baroness von Puttkamer), an author included by a later literary historian among “exponents ... of the right to unrestrained sexual freedom even if perverse,” and described as “so brazenly pornographic [an adjective which the critic employed freely] that the less said the better.”[39] The volume was later privately reissued in a de luxe edition with color plates by nine or ten established contemporary artists.[40] Though most of the poems in Auf Kypros are heterosexual, six or seven match Renée Vivien’s in lesbian frankness, e.g. “Vergib” and “Greisenworte.” “Sappho” too much resembles other imitations of that poet’s most passionate ode or Louÿs’ Songs of Bilitis to need special attention. Another, almost flippant in tone, is from a group entitled “Aus dem Tagebuch einer Demi-Vierge,” and sketches with great economy what is evidently a tranvestist episode. The speaker has given her “Kätzerl” sweets, liqueurs, cigarettes (“natürlich Kyriazi Frères!”)—and kisses—and has kept up her “strenges incognito” so successfully that her Puss really believes her a Man-About-Town. Only the American “Götze” on the end-table (surely Billikin) grins wickedly to hear the impostor repeatedly promise the frustrated girl ‘Everything!!—next time!’

The remaining three lesbian poems express tragic regret for initiating a younger girl. “Vagabunden” is a prophetic warning:

One cannot help wondering whether Vivien, who knew German well and doubtless read these poems at about the time she was writing her own impassioned elegies to Violet, may not have felt their influence.

During the 1890s the picturesque vagabond, Peter Hille, was roaming the country with his scribbled manuscripts in the pockets of his shabby jacket. He was so indifferent to publication that nothing was printed until after his death in 1904, when his friends assembled his Collected Works. Of these, the first volume is made up of poems, among them a long rhapsodic biography of Sappho,[41] representing her as devoted wholly to Beauty. She worships nature, women, and particularly youth as embodiments of beauty, and wants to remain young and free herself, leaving only her poems as offspring. But Hille hears premonitory echoes of “the thunder of Jove”—passion—which will presently overcome her. Therefore, his picture is that of an emotional adolescent; it evades her variant loves and stops short of her marriage, her childbearing, and of her hypothetical passion for Phaon. Among the prose “Aphorisms” in his second volume Hille includes a severe indictment of current lesbianism,[42] which he considers as depraved as any other illicit passion. He says that only women so dedicated to spiritual beauty as to forego all physical expression are entitled to call themselves disciples of Sappho. Thus he is a precursor of Rilke, who similarly idealized her emotional experience as nearer the “divine intent” even than happy heterosexual love. In short, both men are basically ascetic.

In the same year that Hille’s work appeared in print a lesser lyrist, Ernst Stadler, then only twenty, published in Das Magazin für Literatur a poetic drama, “Freundinnen.”[43] It presents the culmination of an ardent friendship between Sylvia and Bianca, one fifteen, the other eighteen, in their mutual awareness of passion under the spell of a full summer moon, but it does not have specific lesbian implications.

A second woman poet, more restrained than Madeleine, is Toni Schwabe, whose Komm kühle Nacht appeared in 1909. Its first group of “Lieder” celebrates the loss of a male lover remembered with bitterness, for his ruthless passion threatened the girl’s life and destroyed her love. The poet sees ahead no feminine happiness, no home or children—a brief cradle song speaks of a child abandoned to others’ care while the singer roams the world, a slave to desire—but only ‘a mad riot of roses and dancing’ and the brief ecstasy that comes with night and dies at dawn. (Dowson’s Cynara, written in the nineties, “I have ... gone with the wind, Flung roses, roses, riotously with the throng Dancing ...” comes inevitably to mind.)

A later group of sonnets are like Louise Labé’s in concealing the sex of the beloved, but are aggressive and masculine in mood. A “Lied der Bilitis an Mnasidika” borrows the most fervent of Louÿs’s lesbian episodes, and some pages of “Translations from the Danish,” said to be of Schwabe’s own composition, begin with two “Songs to Lenore.” The first poem in “Die Stadt mit lichten Türmen” is a dream in which a young count bears the singer into a beech wood and tries futilely to possess her, never divining that only her ‘smiling pity’ prevents her from dealing him a death blow. Probably the most typical mood of the whole volume is represented in “Nie traf ich einen,” in which she says that

This is exactly the mood of Rachilde’s and Schreiner’s heroines and of Barney’s poems.

Only one variant poet has been traced in Germany subsequent to World War I, a woman who wrote under the pseudonym of Iris Ira. Her volume, Lesbos (1930), consists of free renderings of Sappho’s and Anacreon’s surviving fragments, and a similar rendering of the Songs of Bilitis, complete with introductory narrative. (Richard Dehmel had translated in the 1890s only two dozen of its prose-poems.) A translator’s preface to the volume pleads the necessity of maintaining mood rather than literal accuracy, but while the verse displays skill and grace, its tone throughout is more charming than passionate. And passion, of course, was the very essence of Louÿs’s own work.

Poetry—English

Poets in English offer nothing as explicitly lesbian as the work of Vivien or Madeleine, and they seldom equal Barney or Schwabe in frankness of implication. Indeed, last century’s “thick veil of ellipse and metaphor”[45] still shrouds most of our feminine variant lyrists, and even where it has thinned, critics in general have either failed or refused to penetrate it. Consequently some readers may incline to skepticism concerning already familiar material cited below, but in that case they are urged to re-examine it with open mind, not in anthologies but in the authors’ original context, and not for overt lesbianism but for clearly variant significance.

In America, Amy Lowell was the first poet to venture at all openly upon variant ground. She was born three years earlier than Vivien and Barney, the granddaughter of James Russell Lowell and sister of a president of Harvard. In spite of this formidably respectable heritage, she did not escape to Paris but lived out her life in the family mansion in Brookline, though she did create within it her own particular haven. As surely as Renée Vivien felt herself born in the wrong era, Miss Lowell was born in the wrong flesh for a worshipper of female beauty. Even in her adolescent journals she bemoans the excessive weight which robbed her of appeal. Living too early for endocrinology to aid her, she tried rigid dieting, but succeeded only in doing permanent damage to her health. Something of a tomboy in her younger days, as she matured she adopted also the male psychological role. Clement Wood has documented for her as thoroughly as did Moore and Wilson for Emily Brontë this consistent assumption of masculinity, and the reader must be referred to the final chapter of his biography for detailed evidence. He lists there all Lowell’s poems written from a male viewpoint, but for the present purpose only such require mention as are love lyrics addressed to women and spoken as if by the poet in her own person, not through the lips of a fictitious man.

Miss Lowell published nothing until 1912, when she was nearly thirty, but then in A Dome of Many-Colored Glass she included a number of variant verses. “Hora Stellatrix,” for instance, contains the following lines:

The poem entitled “Dipsa” is virtually an epithalamium fifty lines in length, among them:

There is also a sequence of nine sonnets in slightly less specific vein,[46] as plainly written to a woman, and as plainly spoken by the poet herself.

In Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds (1914) five of the last poems—“Blue Scarf,” “White Green,” “Aubade,” “A Lady,” and “In a Garden”—are written to women and are full of passionate imagery. In Pictures of the Floating World (1919) there is a sixty-page sequence, “Planes of Personality: Two Speak Together,” more extensive and unmistakably variant than anything found elsewhere in Lowell. In the first poem, “Vernal Equinox,” one finds: “Why are you not here to overpower me with your tense and urgent love?” The second is the often quoted “The Letter,” empty of variant suggestion when lifted from its context, but ending:

In her final volume, What’s O’Clock, there are thirty pages beginning with “Twenty-four Hokku on a Modern Theme” and ending with “Onlooker,” which are comparable with, though less passionate than, the sequence above.

Charlotte Mew, a woman who by date of birth (1870) should precede Miss Lowell, took her own life in 1928. Virginia Moore describes her as definitely variant.[47] Unhappily for literature she destroyed all traces of that fact even more carefully than did Emily Brontë or Emily Dickinson—so completely that we have of her work only two thin volumes, scarcely fifty poems in all. This meager remainder is of high enough quality to gain her inclusion in the Dictionary of National Biography and in virtually every anthology of twentieth-century poetry. It does not, however, include a single poem of which one can say “this is more variant than otherwise,” though two or three (especially “The Farmer’s Wife”) are poignantly successful in expressing a man’s emotional viewpoint. Several (e.g., “Madeleine in Church”) show a deep religious conviction of sin, and doubtless this, as well as a passion for privacy, led her to the wholesale winnowing which critics, being unaware of her emotional bent, laid to rigorous self-criticism of an aesthetic sort. Certainly if what she destroyed was at all comparable to what remains, there has been no more tragic literary, as well as personal, suicide since Chatterton.

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Writing undoubtedly at the same time as Amy Lowell, for she was born in the same year, was Rose O’Neill. This woman is likely to be recalled today as the creator of the Kewpies, those coy cherubs which became a national fad early in the century, rather than as a serious artist and writer. Nevertheless, she was poet, novelist, and illustrator, the income from her juvenile and humorous works enabling her to pursue her deeper interests. Her claim to inclusion here rests on her single volume of serious verse, which was not published until 1922. Of it, Clement Wood says in his Poets of America:

Its title, taken from Shakespeare’s most debated sonnet, is The Master Mistress, and the title poem hymns “a lovely monster ... seeming two in one, With dreadful beauty doomed,” but the subsequent references to variance are comparatively few and almost equally vague. Only a dozen poems among some two hundred are unmistakably variant—ten written “To Kallista” (that notation appearing as subtitle); “Lee: A Portrait,” and “A Dream of Sappho.” None but the last alludes vividly to any physical expression of love, but all are passionate, and many are specific in their praise of feminine beauty. The third poem in the volume reads:

From the lot of these variant poems the reader retains half-realized images of two different loves, one a delicate and feminine personality, “ceaselessly weeping,” the other:

Though verses spoken through the lips of a fictitious man are much less frequent than in Amy Lowell’s work, two such poems occur. And there are many to which a Celtic titanism—fancies of removing mountains or seizing the moon and stars for toys—lends a definitely masculine tone. Such phrases as “in your princely fashion” and “fitting for you who feast upon fierce things” indicate, moreover, that the poet glories in the masculinity of one of her woman-loves.

Since this volume, whose quality Wood compares to that of the Elizabethan Thomas Campion, is far superior to even the best of O’Neill’s prose, the same question arises as in the case of Louise Labé: how is it that from so articulate a writer, one who rhymed as she breathed, we have no greater quantity of surviving verse? The answer may well be the same, in view of her history.

She was born in Pennsylvania, but lived in no state long enough to call it her own. Her father was a bookseller of more literary than practical gifts, and there is little doubt that the swarming, hilarious and penniless family in her first novel[50] is based on her own background. From infancy the gifted child was destined for a stage career, but it was discovered early that she was too high-strung to endure public appearances. She then chose illustrating as her métier, and although self-taught, was already selling drawings in her early teens. From Omaha, where she attended a convent day school, she went alone at fifteen to New York to seek a better market for her work, and lived there in another convent until her marriage three years later. When her husband died, she was twenty-three and already an established illustrator and the financial mainstay of her family.

The humorous magazine Puck soon became her chief outlet. She joined its staff, and in 1902 married its editor, Harry Leon Wilson, later famous as author of Ruggles of Red Gap and Merton of the Movies. In 1904 O’Neill published The Loves of Edwy, which like two of her three subsequent novels, is written in the first person and from a man’s viewpoint. It is significant that the narrator of this story spends his life in fruitless love of the bewitching heroine, a term in jail for an altruistic forgery being the somewhat strained device which deters him from marrying. The girl, who has returned his love since adolescence, finally accepts another man, but a total psychological block prevents her consummating the marriage.

In 1905 Wilson met Booth Tarkington and the two at once became intimate, going to winter on Capri at Elihu Vedder’s “beautiful, unbelievable villa,” and there collaborating on The Man From Home. O’Neill studied art in Rome and Paris from 1905 to 1907, and twice exhibited in the Paris Salon. She and her husband apparently did not return to America until 1912, living in the interim in their own Villa Narcissus on Capri, which is mentioned as one of her several residences later. Upon her return to the States she was separated from Wilson, and thereafter lived in the Ozarks, in Connecticut, and in New York on Washington Square, where she became a close friend (as was Millay) of Elinor Wylie. In 1929 and 1930 she produced her last novels, The Goblin Woman and Garda, in the latter of which the heroine and a twin brother, Narcissus, are “the two parts of a single whole,” she, the pagan and undisciplined body; he, the sensitive poetic soul. In her first two novels (the second was a whimsical mystery) the central feminine figure embodied soul and conscience, the man being the pagan spirit.

One gains in the end the picture of a dual personality, whose loves may well have changed like the drifting sand, and who made her most profound effort toward sincerity in The Master Mistress. It is known that Capri early in the century was the home of an international homosexual colony, and O’Neill could scarcely have lived there for several years without being drawn into the circle, at least superficially. But her early religious training would have made it difficult for her to freely embrace or champion its way of life. Embodied in her novels are many charming light love lyrics, written by male characters to their loves, and in all probability her private notebooks contained a good bit of more personal variant poetry which will never be made public.

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In 1906, at the age of thirteen, “E. Vincent Millay,” as she then signed herself, saw her first verses printed in the young writers’ section of St. Nicholas Magazine, and four years later her farewell poem—seventeen was the age limit for the “League”—won the year’s cash prize. Entitled “Friends,”[51] this poem presents in two neatly balanced stanzas the incompatible temperaments of an adolescent boy and girl. The girl’s rejection of the senseless brutality of football was the poet’s own, as the hatred of all cruelty in her later work attests. The girl’s occupation—embroidery—was unlikely to have been that of young “Vincent,” who enjoyed a boy’s outdoor activities as well as a boy’s name.

From her debut in St. Nicholas to the end of her life, virtually all of Millay’s work appeared first in periodicals, so that for tracing its chronology Yost’s bibliography of 1937 is invaluable. From this we know that “Interim,” her first poem of variant significance, was written in 1912 along with the better known “Renascence.” “Interim” is a threnody which at least two critics[52] have meticulously insisted is the product of pure imagination, since no one intimately known to the poet had died when she wrote it. It is possible, however, to suffer tragic loss through separation, especially when young, and every homely and poignant detail of “Interim” speaks of immediate experience. One passage near the middle needs particular attention: