Catherine Keyser

"Light Verse, Magazines, and Celebrity: Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker"

In 1928, Time magazine observed that “for ten years, smart young women have been trying to rival with their versification Edna St. Vincent Millay.” This comment connects reader and poet, public and celebrity, as both use poetry as an emblem of public self-fashioning. John Fiske addressed the contemporary female celebrity and her sexualized body in his essay on Madonna in Reading Popular Culture (1989). The contradictions he recognized in Madonna, a celebrity whose persona conveys both objecthood and agency, resemble the ambiguities that cultural historians trace in the flapper. Emulating Fiske’s attention to traces of domination and resistance in the presentation and reception of celebrities, I analyze poets Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker as emblems of modern womanhood within mass-market magazines.

With women moving into cities and entering the professions at unprecedented rates, Millay’s light verse about sexuality and mobility became enormously popular in the 1920s. Dorothy Parker cited Millay’s influence on her own career, claiming that she had been “following in the exquisite footsteps of Edna St. Vincent Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.” This language of “exquisite”-ness also suggests the vexed link between body image, fashion choices, and professional autonomy in the magazine fantasy of the urbane modern woman. I examine two magazines, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, that provided readers with a vision of modernity and class mobility. Both magazines featured rhetoric prizing smartness, graphics promising luxury, and light verse presenting sexuality and femininity.

I argue that the magazine’s pages demonstrate the iconic roles that Millay and Parker played in the cultural imagination. I use the advertisements and cartoons that variously picture and address the poets’ readers to analyze the kinship proposed between young single women working in the city and modern female poets writing about it. Both Millay and Parker were prominent writers of light verse, a genre found in newspapers and magazines and characterized by formal conventionality, simple diction, and (often) rollicking rhymes. This genre emblematized the energy and insouciance of youth culture, as well as the rebellion and flirtation of the flapper. The simplicity of the genre and its covert aggression—the punch-line or twist at the end of the poem—invited the common reader’s participation and indeed self-invention.