Edna St. Vincent Millay's 1920s: Flappers and Poets

P(論文)The two periods, which stand out in the literary history of the United States,are the "American Renaissance" of mid-nineteenth century,and the 1920s which began with the May Day riots in 1919, and died a spectacular death in October 1929. " The jazz age" is the name given to this special decade, " an age of miracles, an age of art , an age of excess, and an age of satire." After the end of the First World War, the United States suddenly found itself on its way to a world's superpower, to quote F.Scott Fitzgerald," it danced into the limelight" on the international political stage. The age gave women their suffrage, and liberated women dramatized themselves as flappers. They had got rid of the Victorian mores of genteel tradition, smoked and drank in public,enjyoying free sex. Their lifestyle and fashion became the cultural symbol of the decade, when " a whole race[went] hedonistic, deciding on pleasure." The same 1920s produced a rich variety of artists, novelists, and poets: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Dreiser, Dos Passos, and such modernist poets as Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot, W.C.Williams, and Wallace Stevens. Also, a group of gifted women poets- Amy Lowell, Mina Roy, Dorothy Parker, Elinor Wylie, and Edna St.Vincent Millay- gave the 1920s its distinct color and " a lovely light." However, later on they have either been critically ignored or simply forgotten in the literary history of the United States. This essay is a vindication of Edna St.Vincent Millay(1892-1950), the first woman poet who won a Pulitzer Prize for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver(1923), through an examination of her representative poems in their historical context then and now. She is the "savage beauty, " who dedicated her life to the creation of beauty, leaving significant poetical works including some 200 sonnets written on the ecstasy and the anguish of love.departmental bulletin pape