Poetic Language and Gender Semiotics in Edna St. Vincent Millay

The prolific literary production of the American poet, playwright and feminist activist Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was overlooked by critics and scholars up to the last decades of the twentieth century. Millay was for several years the symbol of the New Woman of the 1920s. Her poetic language and her rebellious attitude were the perfect trigger for a huge amount of American teenagers who were tired of the inherited moralist social norms and conservative moors of their society. Millay's fresh and revitalizing lines bespeak mainly the popular will to undermine the traditional gender roles by means of a combination of conservative poetic patters and subversive ideas. Keywords: Edna St. Vincent Millay, poetic language, semiotics, intermediality