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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/second-april/"></div>This April, perhaps more than any other that I’ve lived through, I thought about time — how it writes us, how it shapes and reshapes what we write. These reflections led me to revisit the work of a poet whom many readers may know by name but few are familiar with: Edna St. Vincent Millay. What follows is the series of musings which emerged from feeling myself acted upon by our own time — and Vincent’s.
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I. Vincent
Magnetic was the only word for her. With her red hair bobbed, she might have been a medieval pageboy, this woman with a boy’s name who breathed syllables in languid spirals between drags from a cigarette. She turned people into moths to her flame.
Who could have known that her candle burned at both ends?
In December 1920, the celebrity poet Edna St. Vincent Millay — Vincent to her friends — read her work aloud to a packed auditorium at her alma mater, Vassar College. So large was the event that it overflowed the Assembly Hall and had to be moved at the last minute to the larger Students’ Building. Like a popular singer, Vincent took requests from the clamoring crowd. At one point, it seemed as though the applause would never end. Such readings were nothing new to the charismatic young woman. Though her light has faded today, she was hailed in her lifetime as “the greatest woman poet since Sappho.” In 1923, she became the first woman to win the <a href="https://www.pulitzer.org/article/story-behind-first-pulitzer-poetry">newly created</a> Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. A national superstar on a level not seen afterwards until Amanda Gorman, Vincent traveled all over the country reading her work to adoring crowds. On this particular evening, however, a 10-year-old specter of love and loss lingered over the hall. The ghost’s name was Dorothy Coleman.
Of the many poems with which Vincent favored her fans that evening, a handful were the basis of a forthcoming spring-themed collection, The Second April (1921). These struck an unconventional note. The <a href="https://newspaperarchives.vassar.edu/?a=d&amp;d=miscellany19201208-01.2.2&amp;e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN">Vassar Miscellany News</a> would later report that “they breathed a gloom so unmitigated as almost to outweigh their lyrical quality.” Like spring, these poems had grown out of a barren landscape — they had emerged in the aftermath of a pandemic.
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II. April, Again
Pandemic literature means more than feeling seen by history. It gives us new ways of seeing, new ways to peer gingerly out at the world from within the houses of ourselves. At the bottom of our instinct to search for versions of ourselves in Boccaccio, Defoe, and Shakespeare is a question about how to look upon things once familiar now that we, in Vincent’s words, “know what we know.”
Just two years before Vincent’s reading at Vassar, the 1918 flu pandemic gripped the United States. One of the casualties was 18-year-old Dorothy Coleman, her close friend and classmate. Although the exact nature of the young women’s relationship is uncertain, there is speculation that they were lovers. Coleman’s death spurred a period of intense creativity for the young, grief-stricken poet. That same year, she produced a collection of five poems, Memorial to D.C. Upon reading these, Dorothy’s mother wrote to Vincent with mixed feelings. She was grateful for the tribute to her daughter, but disturbed by an unkind reference in one of the poems, “Dirge,” to Dorothy’s “arrogant brow” and “withering tongue,” which she attributed to a bitter quarrel between the two girls. Mrs. Coleman’s perusal of her dead daughter’s diaries had revealed, she told Vincent, that Dorothy “was greatly attracted to you, that she was very happy in having gained your love but in the end she seems to have been a little frightened by your genius.”
Vincent never cut the offending lines. Over the next couple of years, she expanded the memorial into a collection which confronted springtime with mortality. Before T.S. Eliot published his now-canonical lament that “April is the cruelest month,” Vincent wrote bitterly that “April / Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers” (“Spring”). The loss of Dorothy turned Vincent’s world into a “lovely, lovely tattered mist” (“The Blue-Flag in the Bog”). The poem from which the collection takes its title, “Song of a Second April,” looks out onto a world that is unchanging in its first lines and vastly changed by its last:
<blockquote>April this year, not otherwise 
Than April of a year ago, 
Is full of whispers, full of sighs, 
Of dazzling mud and dingy snow . . .
. . . only you are gone, 
You that alone I cared to keep.</blockquote>
A hundred springtimes later, Vincent’s Second April tells us about our own. She asks a question that echoes in our hearts as we begin to contemplate returning to the world: what can beauty say to the knowledge we have garnered between our Aprils?
This April, we are other than we were an April ago. These poems help us to find language for how it feels to have “forgotten how the frogs must sound / After a year of silence,” for the way we’ve grown accustomed to the safety of enclosed spaces and wary, in spite of ourselves, of the “savage Beauty” of the world outside. Finding ourselves changed in an unchanging world means finding ourselves in a new place. In the months and years to come, we will find that we are new people in all the old places.
Recently, I sat beneath a large oak with Vincent’s words and the Appalachian mountains spread before me. For the first time in a year, I registered the pungent smell of mulch, stronger than springs past in my memory, now tyrannized by a white-walled nothingness, a benumbed remnant of the wood-and-hearth aroma of home. A breeze brushed through branches somewhere over my head, where birdsong was. The vividness of everything was offset by a strong, peculiar impression of having been transported into the elsewhere. It was difficult, though at the same time deeply magnetic, to trust this space. I felt all that had and had not changed about the world in a year of absence from it: “only the light from common water / Only the grace from simple stone.”
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III. Words Unseen
We cast our words upon the world, simple stone into common water, in the hope of — what?
“Margin me with scrawling,” answers Vincent.
A century has responded largely with silence.
There has never been a better time to question why we choose to see what we see. Second April invites us to rethink how we have historically undervalued women’s achievements. Literary immortality is Vincent’s answer to death. In “The Poet and His Book,” she calls upon the unknown reader of the future from the moldering mess of a secondhand bookseller’s stall to
<blockquote>Lift this little book, 
Turn the tattered pages, 
Read me, do not let me die! 
Search the fading letters, finding 
Steadfast in the broken binding 
All that once was I!</blockquote>
All that she was should give us pause. Vincent was a popular sensation. She traveled across the US reading her poems to packed auditoriums and was the first poet to have her own on-air reading series on radio. Her volumes were national bestsellers at the height of the Great Depression. For Thomas Hardy, America held two attractions: the skyscraper and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry. The first female recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry was also the epitome of the powerful, modern woman. The sensuality of her lyric was paralleled only by her seductive confidence, her famous green eyes and golden-red hair — and her even more famous affairs. She was also a political artist who channeled her passion for democracy into activist poetry. As fascism and communism rose in pre-World War II Europe, she told a New York Post reporter about her experimental poem, “Conversation at Midnight,” that “The liberty under which this new book of mine comes out is more precious to me than anything anywhere. That’s what makes life real.” And it was within the poet’s power to defend that liberty.
That a poetic titan went from setting the scene to unseen is worth considering — and reversing. Words speak across centuries if we choose to hear them. Poetry may be life-giving, but the reader’s gaze has the power to confer immortality or death. Vincent toys with the idea of her own literary demise with the intention of outliving herself. Yet the last hundred years have seen her overshadowed by T. S. Eliot, e e cummings, Ezra Pound, and other modernists. The time has come to rekindle her flame and bring her back into our line of sight — to be awed by the genius of this female pathbreaker — for she has earned her place, and she speaks to our time too.
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Our Second April

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/quarantined-room-ones/"></div><h5 style="text-align: center;">That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete</h5>
<h5 style="text-align: center;">indifference to a famous library. Venerable and calm, with all its</h5>
<h5 style="text-align: center;">treasures safe locked within its breast, it sleeps complacently and</h5>
<h5 style="text-align: center;">will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep for ever.</h5>
<h6 style="text-align: center;">— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own</h6>
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The building has reawoken. The lights are switched on. In an upstairs room lined from floor to ceiling with crammed bookcases, things are anything but calm. Three display cases are rapidly filling up with books and manuscripts — all of them works by women. Two colleagues and I anxiously measure their dimensions to make sure they’ll accommodate an immense vellum contract with a wax seal depicting Elizabeth I and a Gwendolyn Brooks broadside. We debate the most strategic placement of an iPad loaded with biographies of even more women and their works, a message that our exhibit is just the tip of the iceberg.
That’s how I imagined it happening several months ago, when I approached two fellow PhD students — both, like me, women who specialize in female writers — with the idea of co-curating an exhibition on “500 Years of Women Authors, Self-Authorizing” at Harvard’s rare books and manuscripts repository at the Houghton Library. Stepping over the threshold that Woolf rejected in disillusionment was exactly what I had in mind. But now, as the COVID-19 pandemic compels museums to shut down their onsite operations indefinitely, the project of giving women a room of their own has, quite literally, got to be done while we are unable to access the exhibition room.
We, at least, have been locked out only temporarily and for a good reason. But, somewhat ironically, the emergency closure of the Houghton has transferred the labor of curating and designing a room for women to the same space in which Woolf herself experienced it: the imagination. From our respective rooms in three different locations along the east coast, we have overcome the physical impossibilities the quarantine presents by stealing into our coveted exhibit room in our minds’ eyes. Endless Zoom meetings are devoted to walking through the space in words. The locked library is haunted by our hopes. Ghosts can come from the future too.
When curating women writers under quarantine, one’s present is intensely haunted by both the future and the past. One morning, I laid three sheets of blank paper across my breakfast table and spent several hours arranging and re-arranging grainy black-and-white thumbnails of books on these makeshift, two-dimensional display cases. I carefully laid down a photo I took several months ago of a late-15th-century edition of Saint Jerome’s Vitas Patrum recently acquired by the Houghton. This book — a hagiographical work written by a man, printed by another man, and quite literally about the “fathers” of monasticism — bears an owner’s signature on its title page in scarlet ink: “Johanna”. I squinted down at the woman’s name, printed in grayscale and shrunk down to a size small enough to fit easily into my palm. Who were you? I silently demanded.
“One knows nothing detailed, nothing perfectly true and substantial about her. History scarcely mentions her,” Woolf replied.
That’s not entirely true. History is a series of conscious choices, but even if people choose — as they have for so long — to forget women’s achievements, that doesn’t make those achievements unknowable. The fact that Woolf lived in a world where the unavailability of women’s histories was so complete that it gave rise her conviction of their nonexistence means that these histories must be vigorously excavated if we are to change the world. And, more than that, we have to redefine what exists. Nearly a century later, that work is still just beginning. As three female literary historians curating an exhibit on women, the library as an institution — as an engine of historical decision-making — can no longer be impassive to our existence. We are creating the world Woolf dreamed of, but couldn’t believe in.
But the quarantine has also intensified and ironized Woolf’s demand. While so many museums and libraries have adroitly transitioned to virtual exhibits, the stakes of having a physical room for this particular exhibit have risen. If the Houghton reopens by next spring, the “room of our own” will be the library’s Amy Lowell Room, an exhibition space named after a poet few would recognize, and with whose work even fewer would be familiar today. Lowell, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1926, also made a generous bequest of money, as well as the largest private collection of books and manuscripts related to John Keats, to the Harvard Library upon her death in 1925. It was her philanthropy, not the almost simultaneous recognition of her own literary merit, which ultimately carved out a space for her at Harvard.
But can we say that it’s her own, this room populated by Lowell’s personal collection of books and manuscripts — many of them by women — and volumes purchased with her monetary gift? Has a woman really earned a room of her own simply because it has been named after her and filled with her possessions when history has largely shut its door to her? Under these circumstances, a room of one’s own is a memorial which embodies forgetfulness.
It is also an opportunity to remember.
Like Lowell, the women who will feature in the exhibit have done the work of self-authorization, only to fall through the gaps in collective memory. They were often famous, even infamous, in their own times. Still, how many readers today know about the scandalous splash Lady Mary Wroth made at the court of James I with her autobiographical prose fiction, or Agnes and Maria Catlow’s nineteenth-century contributions to botany and zoology, or Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnets, called “the best of the century” by Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur? With the margin for discovery so wide, the status of “unknown” has an ironic power to reverse itself when cast as a tangible reality, a physical space a viewer can walk into. When so many of history’s scarce mentions get together, it’s pretty astonishing how memorable a roomful of forgotten women can be.
Still, the overwhelming grain of history makes one point eminently clear: three women curating an exhibit about women at one of the world’s foremost research libraries doesn’t mean that our culture has suddenly decided to get woke after a multi-millennial slumber. On its own, it’s just a blink. Curating women at a distance is, in part, a lesson in the ways that the men who once monopolized the power to choose how history was told distanced it from these very women — the same men who, in the past, shut fast the library door, excluding women from those decisions while subjecting them to their effects. This is no longer the case. Now, we are playing out the sequel to Woolf’s words. What happens after women get a room of their own? If we quarantine them within it, temporarily safeguarding them from a culture which pathologically excludes them, only to release them back into this same culture, we are only fooling ourselves that things are changing. Something more has to happen. The cure lies in our own patterns of thinking.
The goal of programs like our exhibit on women’s authorship should be for visitors to walk away with a new hunger as well as new knowledge. And we have to make a concerted effort to feed that hunger by filling in the female-shaped gaps in history. My greatest ambition for this exhibit is that it will catalyze and contribute to this movement. When, if all goes to plan, we return to our very own room in the Houghton and I glance at the first edition of A Room of One’s Own carefully positioned in its display case, I hope it will be with the knowledge that this book is now bearing witness to the opening of a new door.
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(Quarantined in) a Room of One’s Own

V.M. Braganza is a literary critic and book historian at Harvard, where she is writing a book about codes and ciphers in the English Renaissance. She is heading a Spring 2022 exhibit on "500 Years of Women Authors, Self-Authorizing" at Harvard's Houghton Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. You can find her on Twitter at @VanessaBraganza.