Excerpt

Edna St. Vincent Millay's famous sonnet “If I should learn, in some quite casual way,” included in her 1917 volume Renascence and Other Poems, stages the harsh collision of private sentiment and public silence, against the backdrop of the mass culture of modernity. Seated in a crowded subway, the speaker glances at the back of a newspaper held by another commuter, only to learn of the death of a loved one, perhaps a lover, the unnamed addressee of the poem. The fact of the apathetic publication of the news underscores, through ironic contrast, the shock and the depth of private…