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Though Poet Genevieve Taggard's popularity cannot be compared with Poet Millay's, the critical fraternity takes her no less seriously. As a poet she is neither so ladylike nor so lucid, as her sister singer. She does not belong to what Critic Max Eastman calls "the cult of unintelligibility," but readers may puzzle over some of her idiosyncrasies of expression. No maker of enameled verses, she titles her book with a phrase that tells why: Not Mine to Finish. Poet Millay's lyric sadness is resigned; Poet Taggard's is savagely indignant. When she writes To an American Workman Dying of Starvation, she lets literary language go hang:
Swell guy, you got to die.
Did you have fun?
I guess I know you worked.
I guess I saw you.
It got yon just the same.
Say it with flowers.
So long. We got the breaks. But we'll be seeing you.
There's a little job we got to attend to up here, first.
And her opinion of literary poets is more forceful than polite:
. . . I will not touch your "beautiful"—
Carve beauty more and rant her less . . .
The English language is no whore—
What are you making rhyme-schemes for?
The Authors. Though "Edna" is a poor start for a poet's name, "Edna St. Vincent Millay" goes trippingly on the tongue. Like her name, Poet Millay is a "natural." She began writing verse as a child, got it published in St. Nicholas; at Vassar she was the shining literary light. At 31 she had won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (with The Harp-Weaver). The same year she married Eugen Jan Boissevain, whose first wife was her college idol, the late Feminist Inez Milholland. When Musician Deems Taylor was commissioned to compose a U. S. opera, he chose Edna St. Vincent Millay as librettist. Petite, bobbed-haired, vivacious. Poet Millay spends most of her time with her husband at their Austerlitz, N. Y. farm. A frequent lecturer and reciter of her own poems, she reads in a clear but excitingly husky voice. Now 42, she has produced 14 books, no children.
Genevieve Taggard is a Westerner (born in Waitsburg, Wash.) who has wandered all over the world—Hawaii, California, France, Manhattan—is now teaching English literature at Bennington College, Vt. An able critic as well as a poet of metaphysical perceptions, she has written the standard life of Poet Emily Dickinson (The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson). Of moderate size, she gives an impression of classic stature. Married, she has one daughter.
* Sonnets in Fatal Interview (1931) were compared to Petrarch, Shakespeare, Milton, were called ''immortal."