Elizabethan lovemaking: college romance and queer anachronism in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s The Lamp and the Bell

Edna St. Vincent Millay may at first seem an awkward fit for the term ‘lesbian modernist.’ Her work usually sits outside the bounds of modernism, regarded as too formal and sentimental to qualify for entry. While some critics have challenged this assessment, arguing that Millay’s poetry troubles the binary between ‘experimental’ and ‘conventional’ verse, her preference for traditional forms, especially the sonnet, means she is positioned as anathema to the avant-garde. Her sexual orientation is also a vexed issue. Biographers tie themselves in knots attempting to account for her so-called ‘conversion’ from youthful lesbianism to mature heterosexuality. Whilst her bisexuality is widely acknowledged, the fact that she had male lovers and spent the majority of her life married to Eugen Jan Boissevain, rather than forming a long-term lesbian partnership, invalidates her same-sex desire, at least in the eyes of some critics. It is therefore little surprise that studies of ‘lesbian modernism’ tend to overlook Millay, or grant her only a bit-part role.