Song of a Second April

Shortly before and during the time Millay was composing poetry, there was a new literary movement that gained immense popularity and shifted the poetic landscape. Although it is difficult to pinpoint an exact date for its beginnings, Modernism gained momentum due to the early-20th-century’s rapid urbanization, technological advancement, and unprecedented world wars. As the world continued to change in drastic ways, Modernists questioned national traditions, both cultural and literary, and sought out new artistic forms that could best express the modern, industrial, and seemingly meaningless world in which they now lived. The traits of this international movement varied from country to country, but certain artistic principles were near universal to all Modernist poetry. Modernist poetry emphasized innovation and experimentation with poetic form itself, often abandoning traditional literary devices like meter and rhyme and employing new literary techniques. Techniques like pastiche (the blending of two or more different works into one), surrealism, nonlinear narrative, and free verse were among the many poetic forms pioneered by the Modernist movement.

Although her writing career was firmly located within the height of Modernism’s popularity, Millay belonged to a different literary tradition. Educated in the classics, Millay had a particular fondness for Victorian poets like Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Romantic poets like Keats and Coleridge. Accordingly, Millay rarely departed from traditional poetic forms. She often wrote sonnets in the Shakespearean style, and longer poems like “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver” or “Song of a Second April” also maintained regulated rhyme schemes and meter. Because Millay so sharply contrasted with the contemporary Modernist poets, her poetry at times received mixed reviews, despite its immense popularity. Critics who valued the English literary canon praised Millay’s poetry, but Modernist enthusiasts often accused her poetry of being uninteresting and too bound by tradition.