SOURCE: “Lowell, Teasdale, Wylie, Millay, and Bogan,” in The Columbia History of American History, edited by Jay Parini, Columbia University Press, 1993, pp. 203-32.

In the following essay, Larsen explores the work of Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Louise Bogan, asserting that “understanding the value of these poets' work, and the reasons behind the changing estimations of that value, restores to us a fuller picture of a vital era in American poetry.”

Passionate expression of emotion, revelation of personal sensibility, apparent delicacy overlaying sensuality and self-assertion, musicality created by diction and cadence, a vigorous grace of form: these qualities are characteristic of much work by a succession of American women poets. This tradition reached a peak in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, when such poets as Sara Teasdale (1884-1933), Elinor Wylie (1885-1928), and Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) enjoyed...