Edna St. Vincent Millay, political changer
Perhaps you’ve heard of Edna St. Vincent Millay. She was a lyric poet of great renown during the 1920s and until her death in 1950, known mostly for her sonnets. Her fame as a poet was of a magnitude difficult to understand today because there’s no equivalent. Part sprite, part sexual magnet (her candle burned at both ends, with a vengeance), part intellectual—ethereal, earthy, fragile, strong, and brilliant all at the same time—she was an essentially romantic figure.
She was political, too, as poets sometimes are. She opposed the First World War and picketed against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.
But something happened to her right before World War II. During the late Thirties, she became alarmed, enraged, and activated by what was happening in Europe, including the appeasement that led to the fall of Czechoslavakia, and the anti-Semitism of Kristalnacht. Millay was moved to speak out publicly and loudly [the following excerpt is taken from the Millay biography by Nancy Milford, entitled Savage Beauty]:
I used to be a most ardent pacifist, but my mind has been changed. I am afraid the only hope of saving democracy is to fight for it…[There are people in power who are] not human beings in the sense that we have been brought up to understand that term. We have beasts in control of human beings. I am not speaking of the German people themselves, but if we have a wild animal to deal with we cannot be pacifists forever. Whatever we do, we cannot keep aloof from the general world situation, and it would be silly to think we can.
Words such as those were not going to sit well with the crew Millay usually hung out with. But in living her rather shocking life until then (lots of sex with men and women, inside and outside of marriage), courage is one thing Millay always had in abundance. She showed it now by stating:
Persons who begin writing lyric poetry at a young age are deeply concerned with themselves…As they mature, they begin to grow out of themselves and they feel a concern for others. Lyric poets who continue writing lyric poetry are likely to go into a dry rot and just say the same thing over and over again.
One impulse motivating Millay seems to have been a fear for the end of freedom of speech, a right she prized highly. She correctly saw that freedom as being imperiled far more by the threat from without than from within. The following passages from the Milford book concern a radio broadcast Millay made in October of 1939:
What we had to fear most, she said, was the menace of the “most loyal and idealistic Communist, and the most loyal and idealistic Fascist.” If we love democracy, then “We must love it in England and France. In Germany we must love it, if only we could find it there”—and here she paused for a long time—“but we have not found it there.”
Millay added:
Why, then, should we be so afraid to say that as regards the war between a Germany whose political philosophy is repugnant to us and an allied Britain and France whose concepts of civilized living are so closely akin to our own that we hope with all our hearts that Great Britain and France may win this war and Germany lose? [We must avail ourselves] as partiotic Americans, of this fine free speech of ours.
Her 1942 poem “The Murder of Lidice” was highly controversial, and many of her friends were highly critical—not just of its poetic value (I have no way to judge this, not having read it) but of its politics. No surprise there; we’ve seen this sort of thing before and since. Merle Rubin noted, “She seems to have caught more flak from the literary critics for supporting democracy than Ezra Pound did for championing fascism.” And in his journal, her old friend Arthur Ficke wrote:
…this is so bad for her, so false to her real nature…
As a lyric poet, she was superb, unsurpassable…I cannot, I will not, believe that this war is an ultimate conflict between right and wrong: and although I do not doubt for a moment that we are less horrible than the philosophy and practice of Hitler, still I think we are very horrible: and I will not, I must not, accept or express the hysterical patriotic war-moods of these awful days.
This was written in 1942, in the middle of the horror of World War II. It’s the familiar typical stuff; the difference is that, today, most poets would probably say we are more horrible. But after all, this was the Nazis Ficke was talking about. And still, still, this poet called those such as Millay “hysterical,” a practitioner of kneejerk patriotic jingoism rather a clear-sighted observer of an intense conflict between morality and immorality.
This one statement by Ficke sums it up in my view:
“I cannot, I will not, believe that this war is an ultimate conflict between right and wrong:.. ”
Everytime a liberal says something like this, the image comes up in my mind of a 2 year old (or maybe a 16 year old 🙂 ) throwing a temper tantrum. “I don’t believe you!!!” “You can’t make me!!!”
The empirical evidence that these people are somehow stuck in a pre-adult state keeps coming at me.
Is there some reason why artistic types absolutely must be ding-a-lings, or at least go through a protracted (seemingly interminable) ding-a-ling phase?
“Oh, you’re a pacifist? Great. That makes it easy. Give me your wallet, and your car keys. Maybe I’ll beat you senseless anyway, just for entertainment.”
That would constitute what chess players call a refutation across the board.
Fundamentally, while they preen, pacifists are counting on someone else to do their dirty work for them. And that’s immoral.
Thanks, Neo.
They were wrong then, they are wrong now. But will they do any of the bleeding? Not then, not now; it always falls to the rest of us to protect and save them, and do they ever thank us?
We need to put them in the toilet and flush. I know, I know, that ain’t nice, but one’s tolerance should not and need not be infinite.
O.B.:
Re pacifism, I am reminded of the co-heads of the American Friends’ Service Committee, aka Quakers, asked after 9/11 what should be done about Al Qaeda. They hemmed and hawed, finally said the matter should be referred to the UN.
Tom, yeah, and the UN would refer the matter back to us. Problem solved.
Tom, yeah, and the UN would refer the matter back to us. Problem solved.
Oh, come on, that’s a bit unkind.
No, they’d pass a security council resolution “condemning Al Qaeda’s actions in the strongest possible terms” and then… do absolutely nothing about it at all.
Reminds me of the time Al Capp, on a talk-show in the Sixties (back when Capp became on of the first ex-liberal “neo-cons,* ridiculing the New Left), comparing Millay to John Maynard Keynes. He said
satirically that Keynes was “the greatest economist since Edna St. Vincent Millay,” and quoted the burning-the-candle-at-both-ends poem.
*Before, I think, the term was coined and way before it would be rendered meaningless by sloppy usage.
People who say things like the Ficke quote are desperately trying to convince themselves and others that hard, dangerous days do not lie ahead in which they ought to participate.
Millay admits that things are getting bad, will get worse, and that something should be done. That she would be one of the doers at her age is not something she would expect, but she would have known she’d get crap for speaking out. Honor to her.
Who will condemn the hatred of evil that springs from the love of what is good and just? Such hatred has been the driving force of progress in the world’s history — “not peace but a sword” in the cause of mankind’s advancement. And in our case, such hate has been nothing more and nothing less than a manifestation of that highest human feeling: love. For if you love Freedom, you must hate Slavery; if you love your people, you cannot but hate the foreign enemies that compass their destruction; if you love your country, you cannot but hate those who seek to annex it. Simply put: if you love your mother, would you not hate the man who sought to kill her: would you not hate him and fight him at the cost, if needs be, of your own life?
–Menachem Begin, from his 1952 memoir, “The Revolt”
And here I was thinking that they’d do eff all. I stand corrected.
billm99k: no, they’d appoint him to the Human Rights Council.
Occam: Well, I do know some artistic types who are very much not fools….
Actually, it’s not quite true that the American Friends Service Committee is completely pacifist. There are some sorts of violence that they may not exactly condone but they certainly understand. Unsurprisingly, these forms of violence tend to involve killing Jews.
The citation does show it’s not new among large swatches of the left that any form of patriotism, any praising of one’s own side without the necessary balancing and equable blaming is “jingoism.”
“Let’s refer it to the UN’ is basically saying, “I’m not going to deal with it.” And to paraphrase the line attributed to Orwell, they can say such things because there are people ready to do violence in their defense.
“Re pacifism, I am reminded of the co-heads of the American Friends’ Service Committee, aka Quakers, asked after 9/11 what should be done about Al Qaeda. They hemmed and hawed, finally said the matter should be referred to the UN.”
American Friends? Friends of whom I wonder. /spit
There are idiots, there are useful idiots, and there are black holes infinite stupidity.
Or, as a physicist once joked, “They’re so dense, light bends around them.”
Alex Bensky and pst314: please take a look at my two-part series on the Quakers and pacifism. There are actually warring (to coin a phrase) strains of Quakerism that have different points of view on the subject of fighting and if and when it’s okay.
I think Ms. Edna St. Vincent Millay would have loved Led Zeppelin’s “Babe I’m gonna leave you.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoaz02kOf64&feature=fvst
There are always mutants. I’m talking about the wild-type strain.
How I’d love to “moderate” a debate between the two sides, and try to wind them up (“You’re going to take that? He’s saying you guys are sissies and cowards!”) in the hopes of starting a punch-up between them!
Then I could die happy.
The Quakers also opposed the American Revolution. They didn’t believe that independence was worth fighting for. I have to give them marks for consistency, though.
A number of Quakers who joined the American cause were booted out of the church. I don’t remember what the term was. “Excommunicated”, “shunned”, something like that.
Win-win.
Neoneocon:
Richard Nixon was a Quaker, and according to Wikipedia, could have obtained an exemption from fighting.
My maternal grandmother had Quaker ancestry, and one summer during his college years, my father did some driving for Quaker relatives in California. I remember him saying that they still used “thee.” I wonder if in mixing with Quakers in California, if my father might have met the Nixons, or if the Quaker relatives in California knew the Nixons.
Herbert Hoover was also a Quaker. The American Friends Service Committee was instrumental in Hoover’s work in famine relief in Europe after WW1.
Arthur Ficke quote:
What a find! It would be a good exercise to substitute in “Saddam” or “Bin Laden” in the quote, and ask libs if they agree with the sentiment.
Then ask them about WW2. Was it a fight against evil?
Well yes, they would probably say.
Was WW2 a “good fight” well worth doing?
Well yes, they would probably say.
Then inform them the quote was originally about Hitler.
Excuse me, that would be paternal grandmother with Quaker ancestry.
From Wikipedia:
The great singer and songwriter Sandy Denny of Fairport Convention also died after falling down the stairs.
I live in Pennsylvania, which is the heart of Quakerdom. In all fairness, they came to America because of enforced conscription in England, which they wanted no part of. They flat-out refused to accept that their lives belonged to the monarch. Religious freedom and all that.
Is there someone who does? And is there such a thing as unforced conscription? I believe that’s called “volunteering.”
A modest proposal: stick ’em in the front lines, and let the enemy expend ammunition on ’em, ChiCom human wave style. That way they don’t have to fight, and yet not be free riders on others.
Well, conscientious objectors like Quakers were in fact non-combatants in WWII, possibly in Korea also, as medics. That is bravery, without doubt, and service. But my sense is that all changed with ‘Nam and Better Red Than Dead and has not reverted, hence my earlier remarks.
I seem to recall that west-coast Quakers differed substantially from their east-coast counterparts; had churches and ministers, maybe even music. But whether pacifism remained at their core I know not.
As to falling-down-stairs deaths, rickl, some of us here will remember with affection our fellow blogger, FredHJr, who died in the same way consequent to vertigo from his Meniere’s disease.
The doctrine of Original Sin is more and more convincing to me, the more I circle this old sun of ours. The human propensity to evil, if you will. Cain saying of Abel, in the dawn of humankind, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
Occam got me thinking when he asked, “Is there some reason why artistic types absolutely must be ding-a-lings, or at least go through a protracted (seemingly interminable) ding-a-ling phase?”
As an artistic type myself — who loved Millay’s poem “Renascence” in my own artsy, lyrical youth, and was startled by how empty it seemed when I returned to it years later — I’m afraid there does seem to be some kind of requirement along these lines. Some of us artsy people are more ding-a-ling-ish than others, and some of us do manage to outgrow it. Still, looking around at the host of artsy, lefty creative types among my friends and relations, most of whom are long past the age when outgrowing should have happened, but didn’t — I do think there’s something about artistic creativity (as opposed to the engineering, technological, or scientific forms) that inclines such folk toward dreamy unrealistic world views — and along with that, toward immaturity.
Consider the life of the fiction writer. When creating a novel or screenplay or picture book, the writer dreams up a bunch of characters, plops them into a setting, causes them to do exactly as the writer tells them to, invents an ending that neatly settles all their conflicts and makes it all “real” — just by writing, just by dreaming. If you’re lucky, this kind of dreaming all day can alter the outside world as well as the inner; you can get published, you can get attention, you might get rich and famous. And even if none of that happens, you’re still special, you’re still following your heart, you’re still the starving artist in the garret, living out a higher life than those work-a-day drones around you.
I can tell you from personal experience that it takes a some big leaps of faith about oneself and the world to live this way– and, not coincidentally, it also takes a whole lot of self-involvement. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke famously instructed another young poet, the way to write is “to go into your life and to explore the depths where your life wells forth.” (Rilke demonstrated how “going into your life” works in the real world by abandoning his wife and baby daughter to run off to Paris where he could write in peace — still proclaiming his passionate love for his wife but entirely unconcerned as to how his beloved, who had been a promising sculptor before their marriage, would manage to “go into her life” to continue her own artistic career while raising their child alone.)
People who live this deeply inside their own imaginations seem to lose track of the boundary between the imagined world and the real. If dreaming equals doing in the work you do all day, if all you have to do to make a world that works the way you want it to is to write one down — then why shouldn’t it work just as well to end real wars forever, simply by imagining a world without weapons?
Mrs. Whatsit,
I like your points.
When I was in high school, I was in a couple of plays. My director encouraged me to hang out with the theater crowd at college. Tried it a couple of times. Wow. Since then, I’ve brushed up against the artsy types one way or another several times.
I would expand your point from artsy types being dingalings to them being anti-conservative dingalings. When a conservative points to a problem in the real world, he is implicitly requiring the artsy type to function in the real world. Who’d want to leave that cushioned cocoon you describe so well?
The defense is to remake the world until it’s satisfactory once more, and the source of one’s aggravation is the conservative pointing to the oncoming catastrophe. Catastrophes which have not yet arrived are not as real as present annoyances and artsy types can recalculate them out of existence anyway. So we’re left with only the mean, ol’ Jeremiah as the source of all our troubles.
I recall Tom Clancy giving a talk to some journalists–has he no standards?–and he made the point that the journos have it easy. All they have to do is report what happened. The fiction writer has to make sense. As an example, he discussed the origins and the processes that began WW I and said no editor would buy that as a fictional premise. If you get into military history, you’ll find it’s worse than that. Says Keegan, in the planning for the war, Moltke discovered he needed another 150,000 guys to take the Paris fortresses and, further, that he couldn’t get them there. In other words, the war was lost before it started. So he penciled them in and went ahead. Moltke, it should be said, was head of the Great General Staff which made a religion of making a science of the art of war. But he penciled in the situation he wanted and went ahead.
Hitler convinced a bunch of guys intimately involved in losing WW I that they could beat the same bunch they’d lost to before.
The North Koreans heard Dean Acheson say Korea was outside of our sphere of interest and felt poorly-used when we fought them.
The authors of military techno-thrillers, a genre more popular when we aren’t having, you know, real wars, start their wars and their fights in perfectly logical fashion. Readers would be disappointed otherwise.
Imagine a disbelieving snort, “Why would they want to …?” These people who think they are flexible, understand other people, aren’t culture bound, will insist that only their logic and their admitted facts govern. Otherwise, they’d have to face reality, a most uncomfortable position.
Artist belong to probably the most peer pressure driven profession there is. They either conform to expressing their non conformity or they’ll find themselves ostracised.
I have to say i see it more as the artist becoming a ding-a-ling, rather than a ding-a-ling becoming an artist.
“… the writer dreams up a bunch of characters, plops them into a setting, causes them to do exactly as the writer tells them to, invents an ending that neatly settles all their conflicts and makes it all “real” – just by writing, just by dreaming. If you’re lucky, this kind of dreaming all day can alter the outside world as well as the inner; you can get published, you can get attention, you might get rich and famous. And even if none of that happens, you’re still special, you’re still following your heart, you’re still the starving artist in the garret, living out a higher life than those work-a-day drones around you.”
Well, not starving in a garret, exactly … I think of it more as building a scale model in about four dimensions, and I also think of writing as my job, not some kind of higher life. I also like to think that my own work educates as well as entertains. But Mrs. W is correct in that being a writer (or some kind of artsy creator) is also very self-centering, although I haven’t gone to the extreme of abandoning family members! Things that I used to do – before I got caught up in writing professionally – just don’t seem as important to do any more. Things like keeping up a Christmas card list, or doing work around my house and garden just don’t seem like things I want to put a high priority on doing.
But actually, SteveH – I am very much a libertarian-conservative-traditional values sort of person. It’s there in my books too – but I don’t hit people over the head with it. (Social liberals buy books too.) Perhaps I can get away with that by not hanging out in traditionally artistic circles, save on line … where it is possible to de-emphasize that aspect of myself.
Sgt Mom, yes there are exceptions. But i’m suggesting for every Clint Eastwood, John Voight and Michael Crichton, there are literally thousands who never get their foot in the door because of the problem i pointed out.
Sort of a good ole boys club from people who profess to be everything but that.
Well, there are artsy types and then artsy types. My favorite fantasy series is The Wheel of Time by the late Robert Jordan who definitely while being somewhat eccentric, certainly did not have pacifist, etc. outlook.
Then there are my two cousins, both in their 50’s, still trying to somehow eek out a living doing music. Nothing to show for it except living hand to mouth, and yes, still depending on their parents for help.
Well, if there is an artistic good ol’ boys club – and I would agree that there is – it’s a darned good thing that I’ve never bothered with wanting to be in it! That tight little artistic world may be fracturing, even as we post.
Of course, I had the advantage of starting to write historical fiction and getting a following for my books just when indy publishing (and indy music and indy film-making) became technologically possible. And writing HF can be a mostly-solitary effort, not like an acting company, or a musical ensemble, for which you need a LOT of collaborators and a venue.
Henri PoincarĂ©, a great French mathematician, physicist, astronomer and philosopher, when asked about fate of his once hopeful student, said: “This young man? He became a poet. He lacked enough imagination to become a mathematician”.
Physics guy: for your cousins…
Johnny: Mommy, mommy! I want to be a guitar player when I grow up!
Mommy: Now Johnny, you know you can’t do both.
I’ve been playing guitar for 45 years, off and on. I know musicians who are incredible players. They all have day jobs.
I understand the appeal of this. In college I toyed, albeit not seriously, with the idea of becoming a writer myself (hard to believe, I know), but I would have found it hard to slip the moorings of reality enough to unfetter my imagination, such as it is.
The critical difference between writers on one hand and scientists and engineers on the other is that for the latter, reality bats last. The bridge stands, or the bridge falls. The circuit works, or goes poof! as the magic smoke exits. The reaction proceeds smoothly, or ends up dripping from the ceiling (or worse). It’s not enough to have a solution; the solution has to pass muster with reality. Deus ex machina solutions need not apply.
These considerations apply a forteriori to the “appeal to consequences” fallacy so beloved of liberals, viz., that something (in a topical example, the financial collapse of CA, or the classic, nuclear war) can’t happen because the consequences would be terrible. Having friends blinded and maimed in lab explosions, or burnt in lab fires, rapidly disabuses one of this fallacy. Effort does not count. Neither do good intentions, nor being a nice person, nor coming from a nice family, or nor attending a nice school. Reality offers no partial credit, no regrades, and no makeups. You either a) got it right, or b) didn’t, in which latter case you have to deal with the consequences. Period. And that is a sobering realization.
i prefer people celebrated without the additional support of ideologues..
whose work captured people by itself.
the star spangled banner was one such work.
below is another…
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air. . . .
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew –
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
– John Gillespie Magee, Jr
i would take some time and dig into the dark past rewritten for her much like sanger, and others.
check out her wiki
then look at her picture
then page down and you will notice links that link to her
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_and_LGBT_rights
and VOILA you are back in the sexual circus of the early progressives, and sexual liberation..
[kind of odd that you can follow things back so directly, no?]
ah.. anarchists.. what socialists and communists were called before they were called socialists, communists, Fabians, progressives, etc.
Soooo… if you want to undertand THIS:
Krystal Violet Norby, a 25-year-old Minnesota woman was jailed after she allegedly photographed herself having sex with two children and a dog.
you see.
at Millay wiki, its all clean and scrubbed.
we have not learned of her and others again, as we did sanger. (sangers used to be scrubbed but eventually had to accept people putting it back).
you have to dig… if you know the history, then its easier, as you know where to dig.
go ahead. search for radical on her wiki page. nada
search for radical on the lgbt page, bingo!
you see. two worlds..
[it helps them think that they are superior for knowing what you dont! and the naughty secrets help link them up. after all, different cults of the same religion!]
the more you dig the more you note that feminism is lesbian based communism… (i can quote them!).
that is their descriptions of what women experience being with men, hating men, etc… are what one would imagine a lesbian forced by society (really herself not willing to be alone), to have sex with her mate… why its so linked with it, and so on.
why feminists are more a copy of mini men than some new feminine ideal. why the men minded women cringe at makeup, heels, and all those things that are to attract the people they want to be, and are jealous of, etc.
the avant-garde literary magazine The Little Review during Chicago’s literary renaissance, which became not just influential, but soon created a unique place for itself and for her in the American literary and artistic history.[8][9] “An organ of two interests, art and good talk about art”, the monthly’s first issue featured articles on Nietzsche, feminism and psychoanalysis. on Margaret Caroline Anderson
odd, talks about art and art, and its first mag is nihilism, feminism, and psychology… sounds like the art of the frankfurt school, no?
Read:
Refiguring Modernism: Women of 1928
By Bonnie Kime Scott
you can read about millays links and such to these same people in:
All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913-1930
to read th rest of the chapter you find goldman linked to anderson. and anderson linked to millay… and other greenwich village people.
and at the bottom of the page it speaks of another linked up person to all the free love sex stuff (like harmon his daughte,r etc).
Love the beginning of the Wiki article you cited, Artfldgr:
So, basically, communists on the outside, agitating to gain power, support homosexuality, whereas those in power jettison it forthwith.
Expediency, I believe that’s called.
Occam, i would say its more like giving the natives infected blankets… (which never happened).
after all, our mental health professionals lost their way when they forgot that one could give ideas and like a virus cause mental disorder if believed.
so the idea was to change customs to the customs that cause states to fail. the biggest 100% failure being matriarchies (but even the users are being used, they dont realize that part themselves but those that handed it to them do)
toqueville said something to the effect of when america stops being good..
and you can also refer to stalin who said
America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within.
and we are collapsing…
but we will not believe it until its done and you cant stop it.. THEN people will be willing to act to prevent it, otherwise they will hedge.
and you also are pointing out the evidence of what happens AFTER these misfits are used.
once this is also socialist under control, then there will be no one defending them, and do you think that these other states will stop and we will all not do things to them? or more likely we will join them and then what will happen to all these supporters?
I should point out that the russians with the reset button showed a hint of the disdain that others have for them.
after all they are traitors, and the ones that they try to ingratiate themselves to know that they are traitors, and that their fealty is based on the belief in a lie.
ergo, when the job is done, they remove the scaffolding… gays, feminists, and all that are the scaffolding.
oh, women will wonder what does feminist have to do with it. but its easy. when the crap hits the fan, who will they cry to? the men they have been abusing and marginalizing and other things to (thye dont think so, but a lot of the young men do!).
the perfect real world example is Malmo sweden. its now a islamic enclave. jews have fled. police wont enter, and the women that live there have taken to dying their hair black so that they dont get gang raped.
meanwhile the Uk is running a nice program where they are referring to pakistanis who are turning their young slutty laddettes into hookers for islam basically, except that they refer to them as ‘asians’. (so who do you think the hate will be directed at? the wrong people, who will direct hate where?)
note also that your point shows that THEY know what they are linked to, what they are copying and all that, its the ignorati that pretend otherwise.
they did the same thing to men and women that they did to the jews and their society. use disparate impact arguments to get the two sexes apart and commit demographic genocide… while letting lots of others in so that the statistical reports dont show who is exterminating who.
Hitler 12 million gone..
USA 50 million plus exterminated since 1970
Stalin 75 million
Mao 125 million
abortion + social engineering = eugenics
which is why neither are argued together.
anyway.. thanks for pointing that paragraph out, i didnt catch it! 🙂
the biggest 100% failure being matriarchies
[do a search and you can see videos of rosin declaring the feminists won and are near making their matriarchy!]
ergo, when the job is done, they remove the scaffolding… gays, feminists, and all that are the scaffolding.
Perfect metaphor, Artfldgr.
The likely reason Millay favored WWII was that she was a good leftist who sought to protect her motherland: Russia.
Occam got me thinking when he asked, “Is there some reason why artistic types absolutely must be ding-a-lings, or at least go through a protracted (seemingly interminable) ding-a-ling phase?”
As an artist and a christian and a conservative, I can speak first hand of ostracism and self-ostracism. The pulling away is on a gut level at first; then, you begin to understand it and must decide whether or not to continue to be separate.
Others, for the sake of potential success, join in the debauchery: so slowly but eagerly you build your network, making connection with the gatekeepers of your profession, agreeing with them, joining, of “liking” their advocacy groups; until, at some point; you let go the last moorline and cast off into the abyss.
For some it is the normalcy of the middle-class life that is the mask – oh, those up and coming psychologists, doctors and lawyers love to the edgy, flighty, artsy girls! – then, when in position and able to launch, the once “normal” wife launches her career on the back of her seduced/blind husband; she builds were connection just so with the gatekeepers – in this area gays & lesbians – and her art – inferior – becomes oohed and aahed over. the concerns of the husband becomes secondary; and then old baggage to be cast away; or kept in the attic, as it were, if she is only able to do her work supported by his pension ( I am watching a female artist who manipulated her husband, an far superior artist, into a mere shadow of himself; while she has her studio and “art career,” she lives off his pension).
I watch. I understand. But I cannot walk that path.
for those who care, the poem i put above is being mentioned today, since its the poem that ronald reagan took lines from to address the challenger disaster 25 years ago, today.
@Artfldgr
When you wrote of Mabel Dodge I at first thought you were referring to The Mable Dodge who had the huge estate in Madison NJ.
njartist49: you are wrong about Millay. She spoke out against Communism as well, and was very clear in her support for the US and her belief in its moral superiority. And she risked a great deal to do all of this. She also spoke out against Germany during the time when the Soviets and Nazis were allies.
neo.
Right about Millay. The question about just-pre-war peace or war talk is the timing.
Pre or post Molotov-Ribbentrop?
Pre or post Operation Barbarossa?
I think we mentioned Pete Seeger’s neck-snapping one-eighty which led to the withdrawal of the pacifist album “Songs for John Doe” and its replacement by the thumping “Reuben James”.
Timing.
She spoke out against Communism as well, and was very clear in her support for the US and her belief in its moral superiority. And she risked a great deal to do all of this.
Neo, I think the point lies in the great risk to her from her peer group, which implicitly validates my conjecture re the prevalence of ding-a-linghood in the relevant demographic.
Ding-a-linghood? Ding-a-lingosity? For expat maybe this should be Ding-a-lingheit?
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That made her the first artist in Billboard history
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