The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Summary
The 1923 Pulitzer went to Edna St. Vincent Millay for a group of three works taken together rather than one single book: the title poem The Ballad of the Harp Weaver, the earlier collection A Few Figs from Thistles, and a set of Eight Sonnets, and the citation gave Millay the distinction of being the first woman to win the prize once poetry became an official Pulitzer category. The title poem is a narrative ballad, a mother who weaves at a magic harp to clothe her freezing son, who tells the story as a grown man, even as it costs her her own life, told in the plain, driving rhythm of an old fashioned ballad stanza rather than in Millay's more typical lyric mode, and it shows her reaching for folk narrative form alongside the sonnets she was already known for.
A Few Figs from Thistles, first published in 1920 and folded into this recognition, is the more provocative half of the pairing, a set of shorter poems that address female desire and independence with a directness many contemporaries found scandalous for a woman poet to claim so openly; its best known lines, about a candle burning at both ends, became a kind of anthem for the era's restless, self determined young women. The Eight Sonnets complete the group, showing Millay's other register, the strict fourteen line form handled with a technical control that critics of the period, including Edmund Wilson, ranked among the finest sonnet writing of her generation.
Taken together the three works move between a folk ballad's plainspoken grief, a set of frank, sometimes defiant lyrics, and disciplined formal sonnets, and reading them together shows a poet equally comfortable in traditional narrative form and in candid, contemporary subject matter. The combination suits a reader drawn to technically accomplished verse that still speaks plainly about desire, independence and loss rather than dressing those subjects in indirection.
Historical Context & Significance
Edna St. Vincent Millay's 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry made her the first woman to win the award since poetry became an official Pulitzer category the previous year, following two women who had received earlier special citations before that category existed. The prize covered the three works together, The Ballad of the Harp Weaver, A Few Figs from Thistles and Eight Sonnets, rather than a single collection.
Millay had already become a defining figure of Greenwich Village bohemian culture by the time of the award, publicly living out the era's loosened conventions around drinking, romance and gender roles that A Few Figs from Thistles addresses directly in verse. Critical fashion turned against her formal, traditional style during the 1930s as modernism took hold, and serious scholarly attention to her work did not fully revive until the feminist literary criticism of the 1960s and 1970s reclaimed it.