SOURCE: Walker, Cheryl. “Women on the Market: Edna St. Vincent Millay's Body Language.” In Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets, pp. 135-64. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

In the following excerpt, Walker interprets Renascence as emblematic of the poet's awareness of the power and fragility her own body.

Though born only six years after H. D. (1892 versus 1886), Edna St. Vincent Millay seems to belong to a different era. H. D.'s persona, often an elegant form of Artemis, surely has little in common with the flapper image of early Millay. One gives the impression of timelessness; the other strikes us as dated. This may be due to the fact that whereas H. D. toys with the endless displacements necessary to representations of Desire, Millay wishes above all to present herself as Desire incarnate. Her most recognizable mode is demonstrative rather than restrained.

For...