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Flawed Light: American Women Poets and Alcohol
The relationship between alcoholism and the poetic process has been well established, but the history of heavy-drinking poets in the twentieth century tilts disproportionately toward male writers such as John Berryman, Robert Lowell, or Theodore Roethke. Women poets, however, were just as susceptible to alcohol, and they very often wrote about its effects on their bodies, minds, and lives. In this study, Brett C. Millier looks at the role of drinking in the lives and poetry of American women poets in the first half of the twentieth century. Millier reads the poems of Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie, Léonie Adams, Isabella Gardner, and Elizabeth Bishop—and in counterpoint, the poems of Jean Garrigue—to see how they negotiated their alcoholism with their art.

Despite the shame and isolation these writers suffered as a result of their heavy drinking and despite the oppressive restrictions on subject matter placed on women poets by the critical establishment in this era, these female poets nevertheless wrote about alcohol. Millier looks at figures for alcohol and inebriation that these writers used in their work in defiance of the masculine Modernist code of impersonality in art. As women in a remarkable tradition of female lyric poets, their subjects and voices were circumscribed by their sex, but their lasting poems artfully record these painful struggles.

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Flawed Light: American Women Poets and Alcohol
The relationship between alcoholism and the poetic process has been well established, but the history of heavy-drinking poets in the twentieth century tilts disproportionately toward male writers such as John Berryman, Robert Lowell, or Theodore Roethke. Women poets, however, were just as susceptible to alcohol, and they very often wrote about its effects on their bodies, minds, and lives. In this study, Brett C. Millier looks at the role of drinking in the lives and poetry of American women poets in the first half of the twentieth century. Millier reads the poems of Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie, Léonie Adams, Isabella Gardner, and Elizabeth Bishop—and in counterpoint, the poems of Jean Garrigue—to see how they negotiated their alcoholism with their art.

Despite the shame and isolation these writers suffered as a result of their heavy drinking and despite the oppressive restrictions on subject matter placed on women poets by the critical establishment in this era, these female poets nevertheless wrote about alcohol. Millier looks at figures for alcohol and inebriation that these writers used in their work in defiance of the masculine Modernist code of impersonality in art. As women in a remarkable tradition of female lyric poets, their subjects and voices were circumscribed by their sex, but their lasting poems artfully record these painful struggles.

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Flawed Light: American Women Poets and Alcohol

Flawed Light: American Women Poets and Alcohol

by Brett C. Millier
Flawed Light: American Women Poets and Alcohol

Flawed Light: American Women Poets and Alcohol

by Brett C. Millier

Overview

The relationship between alcoholism and the poetic process has been well established, but the history of heavy-drinking poets in the twentieth century tilts disproportionately toward male writers such as John Berryman, Robert Lowell, or Theodore Roethke. Women poets, however, were just as susceptible to alcohol, and they very often wrote about its effects on their bodies, minds, and lives. In this study, Brett C. Millier looks at the role of drinking in the lives and poetry of American women poets in the first half of the twentieth century. Millier reads the poems of Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie, Léonie Adams, Isabella Gardner, and Elizabeth Bishop—and in counterpoint, the poems of Jean Garrigue—to see how they negotiated their alcoholism with their art.

Despite the shame and isolation these writers suffered as a result of their heavy drinking and despite the oppressive restrictions on subject matter placed on women poets by the critical establishment in this era, these female poets nevertheless wrote about alcohol. Millier looks at figures for alcohol and inebriation that these writers used in their work in defiance of the masculine Modernist code of impersonality in art. As women in a remarkable tradition of female lyric poets, their subjects and voices were circumscribed by their sex, but their lasting poems artfully record these painful struggles.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780252034619
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Publication date: 08/24/2009
Edition description: 1st Edition
Pages: 224
Product dimensions: 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Brett C. Millier is Reginald L. Cook Professor of American Literature at Middlebury College and the author of Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It and other works.

Table of Contents

Credits  .  vii
Preface  .  xi
Acknowledgments  .  xv

INTRODUCTION
Women Poets and Alcohol  .  1

1 "JUST A LITTLE ONE"
Dorothy Parker as Archetype  .  17

2 THE ALCHEMIST
Louis Bogan  .  14

3 "I MUST NOT DIE OF PITY"
Edna St. Vincent Millay's Addictions  .  60

4 "HOLD TO OBLIVION"
Elinor Wylie's Intolerable Life  .  78

5 "THOUGHT'S END"
Leonie Adams and the Life of the Mind  .  93

6 "WORDS FROM THE PIAZZA DEL LIMBO"
Isabella Gardner as Fallen Woman  .  111

7 THE PRODIGAL
Elizabeth Bishop's Exile  .  128

8 JEAN GARRIGUE
An Epilogue  .  150

AFTERWORD  .  161

Notes  .  167
Bibliography  .  181
Index  .  193
 
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