It is not easy for people in the XXI century to understand what life during the Great Depression must have been like—let alone for a legal alien belonging to the Generation X to try and comprehend a situation seven decades ago. However, the way Edna St. Vincent Millay puts it in her untitled sonnet XXX published in “Fatal Interview” in 1931, anyone from any time and place can take a glimpse into a part of life during the Great Depression that few people think about. How much of her sonnet corresponds to the literary style of the 1920s, as opposed to that of the 1930s?
Commonly known as “Love is not all,” this traditionalist poet uses her excellent way with words to talk about love. However, Millay is not directly responding to the depression, but rather posing a question: “What would a person give up for love?” According to Millay, she would give up everything—even peace and food. A seemingly straight-forward poem, there is more to the poet’s words than one can read. Experimenting with form, Millay begins by saying “Love is not all.” This sets the tone of the poem, one might think: this will be an exemplary poem for the depression times, in which a woman shares how much love lacks the power to help with survival during hard times. Yet, in the middle of the poem the author goes on to say that “It well may be that in a difficult hour / [. . .] I might be driven to sell your love…” Here is the twist of the poem—Millay states that love is not enough to live with, and then proceeds to say that she might sell it. But the very last verse, “I do not think I would,” allows the reader to understand that some might: Some people might have sold their love for food, or shelter, or peace—but not her. As a true traditionalist poet, she remains true to her principles, to her love, to her significant other. Does Millay have a political agenda up her sleeve that she tries to address with this poem? Is she striving for some kind of reform for “reform’s sake”?
A simple—yet not simplistic—poem like this leaves the reader doubtless: This is a work of art created for the enjoyment of the power of sheer creation, not to establish some sort of social reform, with no political agenda at hand. Millay is not trying to convince all the women in America to fight for love until the end; she is not trying to convince men to lose all in the name of love; she is not implying that it is acceptable to starve in the name of love. All the poet is stating in her poem is that love is not all—a timeless statement. Love does not provide food nor shelter, as Millay states. She also states that some people might give away their love to get something in return—but she would not. That is it. This is the “message” of her poem: She would not let go of love. She is not standing on a soapbox telling women that love is all that is needed to survive the depression; she has no political agenda. Millay is not writing this poem to express the power of social reality, and have people live their lives like she does. This apolitical work of art is meant to please readers with it’s inutility—there is no “swift action” in this poem; there is no deep moral in this poem; there is no political or social reformation undertones. All there is, is art for aesthetic pleasure, art for art’s sake.
With her poetry, Millay won many awards—including the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. She led a very peculiar life (being bisexual and leading a very open marriage to a man, living the perfect bohemian life in New York), which might lead to an understanding of her peculiar poetry. Although her poems were not meant to educate the readers, but rather to present her thoughts on current issues, Millay gave people in the 1930s a reason to live through the rough times of the depression: if there was love, although love was not all, there was a reason to keep striving. And nothing, nothing, should ever replace love, “not meat nor drink.”
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