Millay's A Few Figs From Thistles

The 1920s was the time during which Millay began to truly shine, as a writer and as a human being. In 1920, she wrote several poems which enthralled the up and coming jazz crowd. Millay’s poems began to appear in Vanity Fair, a time when she realized the height of her career (Poetry Foundation). Two of its editors, John Peale Bishop and Edmund Wilson, became another addition to Millay’s long list of suitors, and in August Wilson formally proposed marriage. Unwilling to curtail her career and her lifestyle with a fate of domesticity, she yet again declined. Millay held her career in top priority in regards to the rest of her life. At this point in her life she was writing poems to woo the jazz crowd with words of love and rebellion. Her most famous, and debatably controversial, of those poems was titled A Few Figs From …show more content…
Works such as her poem, "First Fig" were adopted as maxims for the young men and women trying to live as freely and wildly as possible (Vassar Historian). It caused a rift to form among some of her critics and provided the basis for the so-called “Millay legend” of reckless youth and rebellion. Whereas the earlier “Renaissance” concluded that the dimensions of one’s life are determined by sympathy of heart and elevation of soul, the poems in A Few Figs from Thistles negate this philosophic idealism with Millay’s well known flippancy, cynicism, and frankness (Poetry Foundation). The 1920s was an optimal time for Millay to be announced as an author and poet because of the receptiveness of her audience to her ideas and beliefs. Millay expressed in “Figs”, written at the conclusion of World War I, the postwar feelings of the young, their desire to rebel against tradition, and their mood of freedom which was physically shown by many women by cutting off the traditionally long hair in favor of a bob. These sentiments found expression in sonnets through lines