Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay 1892–1950

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Throughout much of her career, Pulitzer Prize-winner Edna St. Vincent Millay was one of the most successful and respected poets in America. She is noted for both her dramatic works, including Aria da capo, The Lamp and the Bell, and the libretto composed for an opera, The King's Henchman, and for such lyric verses as "Renascence" and the poems found in the collections A Few Figs From Thistles, Second April, and The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Like her contemporary Robert Frost, Millay was one of the most skillful writers of sonnets in the twentieth century, and also like Frost, she was able to combine modernist attitudes with traditional forms creating a unique American poetry.

From the age of eight Millay was reared by her strong, independent mother, who divorced the frivolous Henry Millay and became a practical nurse in order to support herself and her three daughters. Though the family was poor, Cora Millay strongly promoted the cultural development of her children through exposure to varied reading materials and music lessons, and she provided constant encouragement to excel. Millay recalled her mother's support in an entry included in Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay: "I cannot remember once in the life when you were not interested in what I was working on, or even suggested that I should put it aside for something else." Millay initially hoped to become a concert pianist, but because her teacher insisted that her hands were too small, she directed her energies to writing. From 1906 to 1910 her poems appeared in the famous children's magazine St. Nicholas, and one of her prize poems was reprinted in a 1907 issue of Current Opinion. As for her reading, she reported in a 1912 letter that she was "very well acquainted" with William Shakespeare, John Milton, William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, George Eliot, and Henrik Ibsen, and she also mentioned some fifty other authors. New England traditions of self-reliance and respect for education, the Penobscot Bay environment, and the spirit and example of her mother helped to make Millay the poet she became.

Only through fortunate chance was Millay brought to public notice. Her mother happened on an announcement of a poetry contest sponsored by The Lyric Year, a proposed annual anthology. Millay submitted some poems, among them her "Renascence." Ferdinand Earle, the editor, liked the poem so well that he wrote to "E. Vincent Millay," as she styled herself, expressing confidence that it would be awarded the first prize. Because the other judges disagreed, "Renascence" won no prize, but it received great praise when The Lyric Year appeared in November, 1912. Meanwhile, Caroline B. Dow, a school director who heard Millay recite her poetry and play her own compositions for piano, determined that the talented young woman should go to college. Encouraged by Miss Dow's promise to contribute to her expenses, Millay applied for scholarships to attend Vassar. After taking several courses at Barnard College in the spring of 1913, Millay enrolled at Vassar, where she received the education that developed her into a cultured and learned poet.

Millay went to New York in the fall of 1917, gave some poetry readings, and refused an offer of a comfortable job as secretary to a wealthy woman. Kennerley published her first book, Renascence, and Other Poems, and in December she secured a part in socialist Floyd Dell's play The Angel Intrudes, which was being presented by the Provincetown Players in Greenwich Village. Millay was soon involved with Dell in a love affair, one that continued intermittently until late 1918, when he was charged with obstructing the war effort. Millay engaged in affairs with several different men, and her relationship with Dell disintegrated. Although sympathetic with socialist hopes "of a free and equal society," as she told Grace Hamilton King in an interview included in The Development of the Social Consciousness of Edna St. Vincent Millay as Manifested in Her Poetry, Millay never became a Communist. However, her works reflect the spirit of nonconformity that imbued her Greenwich Village milieu.

In February of 1918, poet Arthur Davison Ficke, a friend of Dell and correspondent of Millay, stopped off in New York. At the time Ficke was a U.S. Army major bearing military dispatches to France. When he met Millay, they fell in love and had a brief but intense affair that affected them for the rest of their lives and about which both wrote idealizing sonnets. Millay's were published in 1920 issues of Reedy's Mirror and then collected in Second April (1921). Though Millay wore "the red heart crumpled in the side," she believed that love could not endure, that ultimately the grave would have her lover, a sentiment expressed in the line, "And you as well must die, beloved dust." She suggested that lovers should suffer and that they should then sublimate their feelings by pouring them "into the golden vessel of great song." Fearful of being possessed and dominated, the poet disparaged human passion and dedicated her soul to poetry. Millay thus maintained a dichotomy between soul and body that is evident in many of her works.

Millay had made a connection with W. Adolphe Roberts, editor of Ainslee's, a pulp magazine, through a Nicaraguan poet and friend, Salomon de la Selva. Roberts published her poems but suggested that she adopt a pseudonym and write short stories, for which she would receive more money. Under the pen name Nancy Boyd, she produced eight stories for Ainslee's and one for Metropolitan. These "Nancy Boyd" stories, cut to the patterns of popular magazine fiction, mainly concern writers and artists who have adopted Greenwich Village attitudes: antimaterialism, approval of nude bathing, general flouting of conventions, and a Jazz Age spirit of mad gaiety. For the heroines the question of love and marriage versus career is significant. They espouse the view that bodily passions are unimportant compared to the demands of art. Some critics consider the stories footnotes to Millay's poetry.

During 1919 Millay worked mainly on her "Ode to Silence" and on her most experimental play, Aria da capo. Millay's one-act Aria portrays a symbolic playhouse where the play is grotesquely shifted into reality: those who were initially "acting" are ultimately murdered because of greed and suspicion. Moreover, the action will go on endlessly—da capo. Most critics called it an anti-war play; but it also expresses the representative and everlasting like the Medieval morality play Everyman and the biblical story of Cain and Abel. For Millay, Aria da capo represented a considerable achievement. She remained proud of Aria; "to see it well played is an unforgettable experience," she wrote her publisher in one of her collected letters. Since its first production it has remained a popular staple of the poetic drama.

In 1920 Millay's poems began to appear in Vanity Fair, a magazine that struck a note of sophistication. Two of its editors, John Peale Bishop and Edmund Wilson, became Millay's suitors, and in August Wilson formally proposed marriage. Unwilling to subside into a domesticity that would curtail her career, she put him off. In The Shores of Light, Wilson noted the intensity with which she responded to every experience of life. That intensity used up her physical resources, and as the year went on, she suffered increasing fatigue and fell victim to a number of illnesses culminating in what she described in one of her letters as a "small nervous breakdown." Frank Crowninshield, an editor of Vanity Fair, offered to let her go to Europe on a regular salary and write as she pleased under either her own name or as Nancy Boyd, and she sailed for France on January 4, 1921.

Millay wrote comparatively little poetry in Europe, but she completed some significant projects and, as Nancy Boyd, regularly sent satirical sketches to Vanity Fair. In March she finished The Lamp and the Bell, a five-act play commissioned by the Vassar College Alumnae Association for its fiftieth anniversary celebration on June 18, 1921. Based on the fairy tale Snow White and Rose Red, The Lamp and the Bell was a poetic drama shrewdly calculated for the occasion: an outdoor production with a large cast, much spectacle, and colorful costumes of the medieval period. The play's theme is friendship crossed by love. In the end integrity and unselfish love are vindicated. Though she was aware that the play echoed Elizabethan drama, Millay considered it well constructed, but as she later observed in an October, 1947, letter, its blank verse "seldom rises above the merely competent."

Millay spent the early 1920s cultivating her lyrical works, which by 1923 included four volumes. A Few Figs from Thistles, published in 1920, caused consternation among some of her critics and provided the basis for the so-called "Millay legend" of madcap youth and rebellion. Whereas the earlier "Renascence" portrays the transformation of a soul that has taken on the omniscience of God, concluding 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 flippancy, cynicism, and frankness.

As a humorist and satirist, Millay expressed in Figs the postwar feelings of young people, their rebellion against tradition, and their mood of freedom symbolized for many women by bobbed hair. These sentiments found expression in the opening poem of the collection, "First Fig," beginning playfully with the line, "My candle burns at both ends." Prudence, respectability, and constancy were denigrated in other poems of the volume. The cavalier attitude revealed in sonnets through lines like "Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!" and "I shall forget you presently, my dear" was new, presenting the woman as player in the love game no less than the man and frankly accepting biological impulses in love affairs. "Rarely since [ancient Greek lyric poet] Sappho," wrote Carl Van Doren in Many Minds, had a woman "written as outspokenly as Millay."

Figs, with its wit and naughtiness, represents only one facet of Millay's versatility. Her strengths as a poet are more fully demonstrated by her strongly elegiac 1921 volume Second April. Containing both free verse and the impassioned sonnets she had written to Ficke, the collection celebrates the rapture of beauty and laments its inevitable passing. "Beauty is not enough," Millay says in "Spring," her first free-verse poem. April brings renewal of life, but "Life in itself / Is nothing, / An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs." Despair and disillusionment appear in many poems of the volume. "Ode to Silence," expressing dissatisfaction with the noisy city, is an impressive achievement in the long tradition of the free ode. With "The Beanstalk," brash and lively, she asserts the value of poetic imagination in a harsh world by describing the danger and exhilaration of climbing the beanstalk to the sky and claiming equality with the giant.

The Harp-Weaver, and Other Poems, Millay's collection of 1923, was dedicated to her mother: "How the sacrificing mother haunts her," Dorothy Thompson observed in The Courage to Be Happy. A carefully constructed mixture of ballad and nursery rhyme, the title poem tells a story of a penniless, self-sacrificing mother who spends Christmas Eve weaving for her son "wonderful things" on the strings of a harp, "the clothes of a king's son." Millay thus paid tribute to her mother's sacrifices that enabled the young girl to have gifts of music, poetry, and culture—the all-important clothing of mind and heart. Some of these poems speak out for the independence of women; in several, The Girl speaks, revealing an inner life in great contrast to outward appearances. Feminine independence is also dramatized in "The Concert," and the superior woman's exasperation at being patronized, in Sonnet 8: "Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!" Many other sonnets are notable. Sonnet 18, "I, being born a woman and distressed," is a frank, feminist poem acknowledging her biological needs as a woman that leave her "once again undone, possessed"; but thinking as usual in terms of a dichotomy between body and mind, she finds "this frenzy insufficient reason / For conversation when we meet again." The finest sonnet in the collection is the much-praised and frequently anthologized "Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare," which like Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" exhibits an idealism. By way of Euclid, the father of geometry, Millay pays honor to the perfect intellectual pattern of beauty that governs every physical manifestation of it. Also in the volume are seventeen "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree," telling of a New England farm woman who returns in winter to the house of an unloved, commonplace husband to care for him during the ordeal of his last days. Critics regarded the physical and psychological realism of this sequence as truly striking. The poems abound in accurate details of country life set down with startling precision of diction and imagery.

By 1924 Millay's poetry had received many favorable appraisals, though some reviewers voiced reservations. Mark Van Doren recorded in the Nation that Millay had made remarkable improvement from 1917 to 1921, and Pierre Loving in the Greenwich Villager regarded her as the finest living American lyric poet. Harold Lewis Cook said in the introduction to Karl Yost's Millay bibliography that the Harp-Weaver sonnets "mark a milestone in the conquest of prejudice and evasion." Critical commentary indicates that for many women readers, Harp-Weaver was perhaps more important than Figs for expressing the new woman. Harriet Monroe in her Poetry review of Harp-Weaver wrote appreciatively, "How neatly she upsets the carefully built walls of convention which men have set up around their Ideal Woman...!" Monroe further suggested that Millay might "perhaps be the greatest woman poet since Sappho."

In 1922, in the midst of her development as a lyric poet, Millay and her mother went to the south of France, where Millay was supposed to complete "Hardigut," a satiric and allegorical philosophical novel for which she had received an advance from her publisher. But weakened by illnesses, she did not finish the work, and the Millays returned to New York in February, 1923. Refusing the marriage proposals of three of her literary contemporaries, Millay wed Eugen Jan Boissevain in July of 1923. The forty-three-year-old son of a Dutch newspaper owner, Boissevain was a businessman with no literary pretensions. Handsome, robust, and sanguine, he was a widower, once married to feminist Inez Milholland. He did not expect domesticity of his wife but was willing to devote himself to the development of her talents and career. In addition, he assumed full responsibility for the medical care the poet needed and took her to New York for an operation the very day they were married.

Early in 1925 the Metropolitan Opera commissioned Deems Taylor to compose music for an opera to be sung in English, and he asked Millay, whom he had met in Paris, to write a libretto. She agreed to do so. Because she and her husband had decided to leave New York for the country, Boissevain gave up his import business, and in May he purchased a run-down, seven-hundred-acre farm in the Berkshire foothills near the village of Austerlitz, New York. During this period Millay suffered severe headaches and altered vision. She nevertheless began writing a blank verse libretto set in tenth-century England. The work was eventually produced and published as The King's Henchman.

According to the New Yorker, Taylor completed the orchestration of most of the opera in Paris and delivered the whole work on December 24, 1926. Both Elinor Wylie, in New York Herald Tribune Books, and Wilson praised the work for its celebration of youthful first love. Monroe found it an acceptable opera libretto, yet "merely picturesque period decoration" much inferior to Aria da capo, "a modern work of art of heroic significance." But in the second volume of A History of American Drama, Arthur Hobson Quinn gave The King's Henchman credit for passion, dramatic effectiveness, and "stark directness and simplicity." Successful in New York and on tour, the opera also sold well as a book, having eighteen printings in ten months. With its publication and performance, Millay had climbed to another pinnacle of success.

The years between 1923 and 1927 were largely devoted to marriage, travel, the move to the old farm Millay called Steepletop, and the composition of her libretto. In August of 1927, however, Millay became involved in the Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti case. On August 22, she was arrested, with many others, for picketing the State House in Boston, protesting the execution of the Italian anarchists convicted of murder. Convinced, like thousands of others, of a miscarriage of justice, and frustrated at being unable to move Governor Fuller to exercise mercy, Millay later said that the case focused her social consciousness. In a 1941 interview with King she asserted that the Sacco-Vanzetti case made her "more aware of the underground workings of forces alien to true democracy." The experience increased her political disillusionment, bitterness, and suspicion, and it resulted in her article "Fear," published in Outlook on November 9, 1927. In "Fear" she vehemently lashed out against the callousness of mankind and the "unkindness, hypocrisy, and greed" of the elders; she was appalled by "the ugliness of man, his cruelty, his greed, his lying face." Her bitterness appeared in some of the poems of her next volume, The Buck in the Snow, and Other Poems, which was received with enthusiastic approbation in England, where all of her books were popular. "In these experiments the poet's instinct never fails her," summarized Monroe.

Millay began to go on reading tours in the 1920s. Afflicted by neuroses and a basic shyness, she thought of these tours—arranged by her husband—as ordeals. Nonetheless, she continued the readings for many years, and for many in her audiences her appearances were memorable. Ralph McGill recalled in The South and the Southerner the striking impression Millay made during a performance in Nashville: "She wore the first shimmering gold-metal cloth dress I'd ever seen and she was, to me, one of the most fey and beautiful persons I'd ever met." When she read at the University of Chicago in late 1928, she had much the same effect on George Dillon. Dillon was the man who inspired the love sonnets of the 1931 collection Fatal Interview. If Millay and Dillon's affair conformed to the pattern of Fatal Interview, it probably flourished during 1929 and early 1930 and then diminished, but continued sporadically. Fanny Butcher reported in Many Lives: One Love that after Dillon's death a copy of Fatal Interview in his library was found to contain a sheet of paper with a note by Millay: "These are all for you, my darling."

Fatal Interview is similar to a Shakespearean/Elizabethan sonnet sequence, but expresses a woman's point of view. A reviewer for the London Morning Post wrote, "Without discarding the forms of an older convention, she speaks the thoughts of a new age." American poet and critic Allen Tate also pointed out in the New Republic that Millay used a nineteenth-century vocabulary to convey twentieth-century emotion: "She has been from the beginning the one poet of our time who has successfully stood athwart two ages." And Patricia A. Klemans commented in the Colby Library Quarterly that Millay achieved universality "by interweaving the woman's experience with classical myth, traditional love literature, and nature." Several reviewers called the sequence great, praising both the remarkable technique of the sonnets and their meticulously accurate diction.

Millay's next collection, Wine from These Grapes (1934), though it had no personal love poems, contained a notable eighteen sonnet sequence, "Epitaph for the Race of Man." The St. Louis Post-Dispatch had published ten of the poems under that title in 1928; Millay added others and made decisions regarding the organization of the sequence, which has a panoramic scope. The first five sonnets prophesy man's disappearance and indicate points in geological and evolutionary history from far past to distant future. The second set reveals man's activities and capacity for heroism, but is followed by two sonnets demonstrating human intolerance and alienation from nature. In the sequence's final sonnets, the eventual extinction of humanity is prophesied, with will and appetite dominating. The poet did not intend the "Epitaph" as a gloomy prediction but, rather, as a "challenge" to mankind, or as she told King in 1941, a "heartfelt tribute to the magnificence of man." Walter S. Minot in his University of Nebraska dissertation concluded: "By continually balancing man's greatness against his weakness, Millay has conjured up a miniature tragedy in which man, the tragic hero, is seen failing because of the fatal flaw within him."

During winter and spring of 1936, Millay worked on Conversation at Midnight, which she had been planning for several years. But soon after reaching a hotel on Sanibel Island, Florida, she saw the building in flames and knew her manuscript had been destroyed. Upon her return to Steepletop, she began to call up the material from memory and write it down. Other misfortunes followed. In the summer of 1936, when the door of Millay and Boissevain's station wagon flew open, Millay was thrown into a gully, injuring her arm and back. As time passed the pain from this injury worsened. She endured hospitalizations, operations, and treatment with addictive drugs, and she suffered neurotic fears. Witter Bynner noted in a June 29, 1939, journal entry, published in his Selected Letters, that at this time, Millay appeared "a mime now with a lost face.... She thinks immediately of going home, of escape.... [Her] ... face sagging, eyes blearily absent, even the shoulders looking like yesterday's vegetables." Two days later she seemed more normal. By March 10, 1941, she reported in a letter, her pain was much less; but her husband had "lost everything" because of the war. Despite Millay and Boissevain's troubles, Christmas of 1941 found her "really cured."

Even through these years she continued to compose. Huntsman, What Quarry?, her last volume before World War II, came out in May, 1939, and within the month sixty-thousand copies had been sold. The uneven volume is a collection of poems written from 1927 to 1938. A few of these works reflect European events. Others are descriptive and philosophical poems—poems dealing with love and sex—and personal poems—some defiant, others pervaded by feelings of regret and loss. Millay's frank feminism also persists in the collection. The distinguished writers who reviewed the volume disagreed about its quality; but they generally felt, as did Paul Rosenfeld in Poetry, that it was an autumnal book in which a middle-aged woman looked back into her memories with a sense of loss.

The 1930s were trying years for Millay. Until the advent of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich in 1933 she had remained a fervent pacifist. But the attacks of the Japanese, the Nazis, and the Italians upon their neighbors, together with both the German-Russian treaty of August 23, 1939, and the start of World War II, combined to change her views. On October 24, 1939, she appeared at the Herald Tribune Forum to advocate American preparedness. After the Nazis defeated the Low Countries and France in May and June of 1940, she began writing propaganda verse. With what Millay herself described in her collected letters as "acres of bad poetry" collected in Make Bright the Arrows: 1940 Notebook, she hoped to rouse the nation. However, as Ficke noted in his personal copy of Millay's Collected Sonnets (1941), her efforts were not effective, "being so largely hysterical and vituperative." After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor she produced propaganda verse upon assignment for the Writers' War Board. Chief among these writings is The Murder of Lidice (1942), a trite ballad on a Nazi atrocity, the destroying of the Czech village of Lidice.

The strain of composing, against deadlines, "hastily written and hot-headed pieces"—as she labeled them in a January, 1946, letter—led to a nervous breakdown in 1944, and for a long time she was unable to write. Friends who visited Steepletop thought Millay's husband babied her too much; but Joan Dash contended in A Life of One's Own that only Boissevain's solicitude and encouragement enabled Millay to enjoy creative satisfaction again. After her husband's death from a stroke in 1949 following the removal of a lung, Millay suffered greatly, drank recklessly, and had to be hospitalized. But a month later she was back at Steepletop, where she stoically passed a lonely year working on a new book of poems. The volume, Mine the Harvest (1954), did not appear, however, until four years after her death from a heart attack in 1950.

From almost universal acclaim in the 1920s, Millay's poetic reputation declined in the 1930s. Few critics thought she had spent her time well in translating Baudelaire with Dillon or in writing the discursive Conversation at Midnight (1937). Her directness came to seem old-fashioned as the intellectual poetry of international Modernism came into vogue. In 1931 Millay told Elizabeth Breuer in Pictorial Review that readers liked her work because it was on age-old themes such as love, death, and nature. When Winfield Townley Scott reviewed Collected Sonnets and Collected Lyrics in Poetry, he said the "literati" had rejected Millay for "glibness and popularity."

By the 1960s the Modernism espoused by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and W. H. Auden had assumed great importance, and the romantic poetry of Millay and the other women poets of her generation was largely ignored. But the growing spread of feminism eventually revived an interest in her writings, and she regained recognition as a highly gifted writer—one who created many fine poems and spoke her mind freely in the best American tradition, upholding freedom and individualism; championing radical, idealistic humanist tenets; and holding broad sympathies and a deep reverence for life.

CAREER

Poet, dramatist, lyricist, lecturer, translator, and short story writer. Acted with Provincetown Players, 1917-19; free-lance writer for periodicals, 1919-20; traveled in Europe, 1921-23; toured the Orient, 1924; gave reading tours, beginning in 1925, and national radio broadcasts, 1932-33; Prix Femina Committee, president and presenter, c. early 1930s; produced propaganda verse for Writers' War Board during early 1940s.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Renascence, and Other Poems (title poem first published under name E. Vincent Millay in The Lyric Year, 1912; collection includes God's World), M. Kennerley, 1917 , reprinted, Books for Libraries Press, 1972. A Few Figs From Thistles: Poems and Four Sonnets, F. Shay, 1920, enlarged edition published as A Few Figs From Thistles: Poems and Sonnets,F. Shay, 1921. Second April (poems; includes Spring, Ode to Silence,and The Beanstalk), M. Kennerley, 1921, reprinted, Harper, 1935 (also see below). (And director) Aria da capo (one-act play in verse; first produced in Greenwich Village, NY, December 5, 1919), M. Kennerley, 1921 (also see below). The Lamp and the Bell (five-act play; first produced June 18, 1921), F. Shay, 1921 (also see below). Two Slatterns and a King: A Moral Interlude (play), Stewart Kidd, 1921 (also see below). The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver, F. Shay, 1922, reprinted as The Harp-Weaver, in The Harp-Weaver, and Other Poems (includes The Concert, Euclid Alone has Looked on Beauty Bare, and Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree), Harper, 1923. Poems, M. Secker, 1923. (Under pseudonym Nancy Boyd) Distressing Dialogues, preface by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Harper, 1924. Three Plays (contains Two Slatterns and a King, Aria da capo, and The Lamp and the Bell), Harper, 1926. (Author of libretto) The King's Henchman (three-act play; first produced in New York, February 17, 1927), Harper, 1927. The Buck in the Snow, and Other Poems (includes The Buck in the Snow [also see below] and On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven), Harper, 1928. Fatal Interview (sonnets), Harper, 1931. The Princess Marries the Page (one-act play), Harper, 1932. Wine from These Grapes (poems; includes Epitaph for the Race of Man and In the Grave No Flower), Harper, 1934. (Translator with George Dillon; and author of introduction) Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil, Harper, 1936. Conversation at Midnight (narrative poem), Harper, 1937. Huntsman, What Quarry? (poems), Harper, 1939. There Are No Islands, Any More: Lines Written in Passion and in Deep Concern for England, France, and My Own Country, Harper, 1940. Make Bright the Arrows: 1940 Notebook (poems), Harper, 1940. The Murder of Lidice (poem), Harper, 1942. Second April [and] The Buck in the Snow, introduction by William Ross Benet, Harper, 1950. Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay, edited by Allan Ross Macdougall, Harper, 1952. Mine the Harvest (poems), edited by Norma Millay, Harper, 1954. Take Up the Song, Harper, 1986, reprinted with music by William Albright as Take Up the Song: Soprano Solo, Mixed Chorus, and Piano, Henmar Press, 1994. Selected Poems/The Centenary Edition, edited by Colin Falck, Harper Perennial, 1992. Works also published in various collections, including Collected Poems, edited by Norma Millay, Harper, 1956; Collected Lyrics of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Harper, 1967; Collected Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Perennial Library, 1988; andEarly Poems, Penguin Books, 1998; works represented in American Poetry: A Miscellany. Also author of Fear, originally published in Outlook in 1927; Invocation to the Muses; Poem and Prayer for an Invading Army; and of lyrics for songs and operas. Contributor to numerous periodicals, including St. Nicholas, Current Opinion, The Lyric Year, Ainslee's, Poetry, Reedy's Mirror, Metropolitan, Forum, The Smart Set, Vanity Fair, Century, Dial, Nation, New Republic, Chapbook, Yale Review, Vassar Miscellany Monthly, Liberator, Harper's, Saturday Review of Literature, Outlook, Saturday Evening Post, Ladies' Home Journal, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, New York Herald-Tribune Magazine, and New York Times Magazine.

FURTHER READING

BOOKS Andrews, Betty, No Wider than the Heart: A Play in Two Acts: Based on the Life and Work of the Poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dramatic Publications, 1994. Atkins, Elizabeth, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Her Times, University of Chicago Press, 1936. Beach, Joseph Warren, Obsessive Images: Symbolism in Poetry of the 1930s and 1940s, University of Minnesota Press, 1960. Bogan, Louise, Achievement in American Poetry: 1900-1950, Regnery, 1951. Brittin, Norman A., Edna St. Vincent Millay, Twayne, 1967, revised edition, G. K. Hall, 1982. Butcher, Fanny, Many Lives: One Love, Harper, 1972. Bynner, Witter, The Works of Witter Bynner: Selected Letters, edited by James Kraft, Farrar, Straus, 1981. Collins, Joseph P., Taking the Literary Pulse, Doran, 1924. Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: The Twenties, 1917-1929, Gale, 1989. Cowley, Malcolm, editor, After the Genteel Tradition: American Writers Since 1910, Norton, 1937. Dash, Joan, A Life of One's Own: Three Gifted Women and the Men They Married, Harper, 1973. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 45: American Poets, 1880-1945, First Series, Gale, 1986. Eastman, Max, Great Companions: Critical Memoirs of Some Famous Friends, Farrar, Straus, 1959. Epstein, Daniel Mark, What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Holt, 2001. Freedman, Diane P., Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal, Southern Illinois University, 1995. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, editors, Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, Indiana University Press, 1979. Gould, Jean, The Poet and Her Book: A Biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dodd, Mead, 1969. Gurko, Miriam, Restless Spirit: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Crowell, 1962. Hahn, Emily, Romantic Rebels: An Informal History of Bohemianism in America, Houghton, 1966. Kessler-Harris, Alice, and William McBrien, editors, Faith of a (Woman) Writer, Greenwood Press, 1988. King, Grace Hamilton, The Development of the Social Consciousness of Edna St. Vincent Millay As Manifested in Her Poetry (dissertation), [New York University], 1943. Kreymborg, Alfred, Our Singing Strength, Coward, McCann, 1929. Madeleva, Sister M., Chaucer's Nuns and Other Essays, Appleton, 1925. McGill, Ralph, The South and the Southerner, Little, Brown, 1963. Milford, Nancy, Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Random House, 2001. Millay, Edna St. Vincent, A Few Figs From Thistles: Poems and Sonnets, F. Shay, 1921. Millay, Edna St. Vincent, The Harp-Weaver, and Other Poems, Harper, 1923. Millay, Edna St. Vincent,Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay, edited by Allan Ross MacDougall, Harper, 1952. Millay, Edna St. Vincent, Second April, M. Kennerley, 1921. Minot, Walter, S., Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Critical Revaluation (dissertation), [University of Nebraska], 1972. Nierman, Judith, Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Reference Guide, G. K. Hall, 1977. Ostriker, Alicia Suskin, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America, Beacon Press, 1986. Poetry Criticism, Volume 6, Gale, 1993. Quinn, Arthur Hobson, A History of American Drama From the Civil War to the Present Day, Volume 2, revised edition, Crofts, 1937. Sheehan, Vincent, The Indigo Bunting: A Memoir of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Harper, 1951. Thompson, Dorothy, The Courage to Be Happy, Houghton, 1957. Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 4, 1981, Volume 49, 1993. Untermeyer, Louis, American Poetry Since 1900, Harcourt, 1923. Van Doren, Carl, Many Minds, Knopf, 1924. Wilson, Edmund, The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties, Farrar, Straus, 1952. Yost, Karl, A Bibliography of the Works of Edna St. Vincent Millay, with an essay in appreciation by Harold Lewis Cook, Harper, 1937. PERIODICALS Book Review, January, 1924. Colby Library Quarterly, March, 1979. Greenwich Villager, August 3, 1921. Literary Digest, June 9, 1923. Mark Twain Journal, spring, 1964. Measure, April, 1924. Modern American Poetry, October 13, 1928. Morning Post, (London), November 10, 1931. Nation, October 26, 1921, November 14, 1934. New England Quarterly, June, 1975. New Republic, December 10, 1924, May 6, 1931. New Yorker, February 19, 1927. New York Herald Tribune Books, February 20, 1927, November 11, 1934. New York Times, December 14, 1919. Outlook, November 9, 1927. Outlook and Independent, April 29, 1931. Pictorial Review, November, 1931. Poetry, August, 1924, April, 1927, February, 1935, October, 1939, March, 1944. Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota, summer, 1931. School Library Journal, October, 1991, p. 157, July, 1994, p. 61. Saturday Review of Literature, November 10, 1934. Sewanee Review, January-March, 1930. Southwest Review, January, 1935. Times Literary Supplement, August 21, 1992. OBITUARIES Life, October 30, 1950. Nation, December 20, 1950. New York Times, October 20, 1950. Saturday Evening Post, November 25, 1950. Time, October 30, 1950.

____________________________________ http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jmillay.htm Edna St Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine on 22nd February, 1892. Cora St Vincent Millay raised Edna and her three sisters on her own after her husband left the family home. When Edna was twenty her poem, Renascence, was published in The Lyric Year. As a result of this poem Edna won a scholarship to Vassar.

In 1917, the year of her graduation, Millay published her first book, Renascence and Other Poems. After leaving Vassar she moved to New York's Greenwich Village where she befriended writers such as Floyd Dell, John Reed and Max Eastman. The three men were all involved in the left-wing journal, the Masses, and she joined in their campaign against USA involvement in the First World War.

Millay also joined the Provincetown Theatre Group. Others who wrote or acted for the group included Floyd Dell, Eugene O'Neill, John Reed, George Gig Cook, Susan Glaspell and Louise Bryant. Millay was considered a great success as Annabelle in Floyd Dell's The Angel Intrudes. In 1918 Millay directed and took the lead in her own play, The Princess Marries the Page. Later she directed her morality play, Two Slatterns and the King at Provincetown.

In 1920 Millay published a new volume of poems, A Few Figs from Thistles. This created considerable controversy as the poems dealt with issues such as female sexuality and feminism. Her next volume of poems, The Harp Weaver (1923), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Millay married Eugen Boissevain, the widower of Inez Milholland, in 1923. Both were believers in free-love and it was agreed they should have an open marriage. Boissevain managed Millay's literary career and this included the highly popular readings of her work. In his autobiography, Homecoming (1933), Floyd Dell commented that he had "never heard poetry read so beautifully".

In 1927 joined with other artists such as John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Dorothy Parker, Ben Shahn, Floyd Dell in the campaign against the proposed execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The day before the execution Millay was arrested at a demonstration in Boston for "sauntering and loitering" and carrying the placard "If These Men Are Executed, Justice is Dead in Massachusetts".

Later Millay was to write several poems about the the Sacco-Vanzetti Case. The most famous of these was Justice Denied in Massachusetts. Her next volume of poems, The Buck and the Snow (1928) included several others including Hangman's Oak, The Anguish, Wine from These Grapes and To Those Without Pity.

In 1931 Millay published, Fatal Interview (1931) a volume of 52 sonnets in celebration of a recent love affair. Edmund Wilson claimed the book contained some of the greatest poems of the 20th century. Others were more critical preferring the more political material that had appeared in The Buck and the Snow.

Her next volume of poems, Wine From These Grapes (1934) included the remarkable Conscientious Objector, a poem that expressed her strong views on pacifism. Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939) also dealt with political issues such as the Spanish Civil War and the growth of fascism.

During the Second World War Millay abandoned her pacifists views and wrote patriotic poems such as Not to be Spattered by His Blood (1941), Murder at Lidice (1942) and Poem and Prayer for an Invading Army (1944). Edna St Vincent Millay died in 1950.

(3) Edna St. Vincent Millay, Justice Denied in Massachusetts (1927)

Let us abandon then our gardens and go home And sit in the sitting-room. Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under the cloud? Sour to the fruitful seed Is the cold earth under this cloud, Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot conquer; We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them.

Let us go home, and sit in the sitting-room. Not in our day Shall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before, Beneficent upon us Out of the glittering bay, And the warm winds be blown inward from the sea Moving the blades of corn With a peaceful sound. Forlorn, forlorn, Stands the blue hay-rack by the empty mow. And the petals drop to the ground, Leaving the tree unfruited. The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed uprooted - We shall not feel it again. We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.

What from the splendid dead We have inherited - Furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued - See now the slug and the mildew plunder. Evil does not overwhelm The larkspur and the corn; We have seen them go under.

Let us sit here, sit still, Here in the sitting-room until we die; At the step of Death on the walk, rise and go; Leaving to our children's children this beautiful doorway, And this elm, And a blighted earth to till With a broken hoe.

(4) Edna St. Vincent Millay, Conscientious Objector (1931)

I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death. I hear him leading his horse out of the stall; I hear the clatter on the barn-floor. He is in haste; he has business in Cuba, business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning. But I will not hold the bridle while he clinches the girth. And he may mount by himself: I will not give him a leg up.

Though he flick my shoulders with his whip, I will not tell him which way the fox ran. With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where the black boy hides in the swamp. I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death; I am not on his pay-roll.

I will not tell him the whereabouts of my friends nor of my enemies either. Though he promise me much, I will not map him the route to any man's door. Am I a spy in the land of the living, that I should deliver men to Death? Brother, the password and the plans of our city are safe with me; never through me Shall you be overcome.

(5) Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sonnet XXVIII, Fatal Interview (1931)

When we are old and these rejoicing veins Are frosty channels to a muted stream, And out of all our burning their remains No feeblest spark to fire us, even in dream, This be our solace: that it was not said When we were young and warm and in our prime, Upon our couch we lay as lie the dead, Sleeping away the unreturning time. O sweet, O heavy-lidded, O my love, When morning strikes her spear upon the land, And we must rise and arm us and reprove The insolent daylight with a steady hand, Be not discountenanced if the knowing know We rose from rapture but an hour ago.

(6) In June 1934, the poet, Arthur Ficke, asked Edna St. Vincent Millay to write down the "five requisites for the happiness of the human race."

A job, - something at which you must work for a few hours every day; An assurance that you will have at least one meal a day for at least the next week; An opportunity to visit all the countries of the world, to acquaint yourself with the customs and their culture; Freedom in religion, or freedom from all religions, as you prefer; An assurance that no door is closed to you, - that you may climb as high as you can build your ladder.

http://capecodhistory.us/genealogy/getperson.php?personID=I8654&tre...

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, on February 22, 1892. Her mother, Cora, raised her three daughters on her own after asking her husband to leave the family home in 1899. Cora encouraged her girls to be ambitious and self-sufficient, teaching them an appreciation of music and literature from an early age. In 1912, at her mother's urging, Millay entered her poem "Renascence" into a contest: she won fourth place and publication in The Lyric Year, bringing her immediate acclaim and a scholarship to Vassar. There, she continued to write poetry and became involved in the theater. She also developed intimate relationships with several women while in school, including the English actress Wynne Matthison. In 1917, the year of her graduation, Millay published her first book, Renascence and Other Poems. At the request of Vassar's drama department, she also wrote her first verse play, The Lamp and the Bell (1921), a work about love between women.

Millay, whose friends called her "Vincent," then moved to New York's Greenwich Village, where she led a notoriously Bohemian life. She lived in a nine-foot-wide attic and wrote anything she could find an editor willing to accept. She and the other writers of Greenwich Village were, according to Millay herself, "very, very poor and very, very merry." She joined the Provincetown Players in their early days, and befriended writers such as Witter Bynner, Edmund Wilson, Susan Glaspell, and Floyd Dell, who asked for Millay's hand in marriage. Millay, who was openly bisexual, refused, despite Dell's attempts to persuade her otherwise. That same year Millay published A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), a volume of poetry which drew much attention for its controversial descriptions of female sexuality and feminism. In 1923 her fourth volume of poems, The Harp Weaver, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In addition to publishing three plays in verse, Millay also wrote the libretto of one of the few American grand operas, The King's Henchman (1927).

Millay married Eugen Boissevain, a self-proclaimed feminist and widower of Inez Milholland, in 1923. Boissevain gave up his own pursuits to manage Millay's literary career, setting up the readings and public appearances for which Millay grew quite famous. According to Millay's own accounts, the couple acted liked two bachelors, remaining "sexually open" throughout their twenty-six-year marriage, which ended with Boissevain's death in 1949. Edna St. Vincent Millay died in 1950.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

A Few Figs from Thistles (1920) Collected Lyrics (1943) Collected Poems (1949) Collected Poems (1956) Collected Sonnets (1941) Conversations at Midnight (1937) Distressing Dialogues (1924) Fatal Interview (1931) Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939) Invocation of the Muses (1941) Make Bright the Arrows (1940) Mine the Harvest (1954) Poem and Prayer for an Invading Army (1944) Poems (1923) Renascence and Other Poems (1917) Second April (1921) The Buck in the Snow (1928) The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1923) There Are No Islands Any More (1940) Wine from These Grapes (1934)

Drama

Aria da Capo (1921) Distressing Dialogues (1924) The King's Henchmanv (1927) The Lamp and the Bell (1921) The Murder of Lidice (1942) The Princess Marries the Page (1932) Three Plays (1926) Two Slatterns and a King (1921)

____________________________________________________________________________________

Poet. Edna was born to Cora Lounella who was a nurse, and Henry Tollman Millay, he was a schoolteacher who would later become superintendent of schools. Her mother Cora taught Edna to write poetry when she was age 4 and play the piano at the age of 7. Edna published her first poem "Forest Trees" at the age of 14. Edna went to Vassar College in 1914 supported by woman who was impressed by her poem "Renascence." She studied literature, drama, and classic and modern languages. She was a good student who often had poems published in the Vassar Miscellany and acted in school dramas. Millay and her sister Norma moved to Greenwhich Village in New York City where Millay hoped to make a living by acting. In 1923, Ednas poem, "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver," was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In 1923, Millay married Eugen Boissevain, He was a Dutch businessman and widower. In 1949, Boissevain died suddenly after an operation for a lung condition. Loney and heart broken, Edna was found dead on the stairs of her home on the morning of October 19, 1950. She died from a heart attack. She was going to bed with a work of poetry in her hands.

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=Millay&GSfn=E...

________________________________________

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jmillay.htm Edna St Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine on 22nd February, 1892. Cora St Vincent Millay raised Edna and her three sisters on her own after her husband left the family home. When Edna was twenty her poem, Renascence, was published in The Lyric Year. As a result of this poem Edna won a scholarship to Vassar.

In 1917, the year of her graduation, Millay published her first book, Renascence and Other Poems. After leaving Vassar she moved to New York's Greenwich Village where she befriended writers such as Floyd Dell, John Reed and Max Eastman. The three men were all involved in the left-wing journal, the Masses, and she joined in their campaign against USA involvement in the First World War.

Millay also joined the Provincetown Theatre Group. Others who wrote or acted for the group included Floyd Dell, Eugene O'Neill, John Reed, George Gig Cook, Susan Glaspell and Louise Bryant. Millay was considered a great success as Annabelle in Floyd Dell's The Angel Intrudes. In 1918 Millay directed and took the lead in her own play, The Princess Marries the Page. Later she directed her morality play, Two Slatterns and the King at Provincetown.

In 1920 Millay published a new volume of poems, A Few Figs from Thistles. This created considerable controversy as the poems dealt with issues such as female sexuality and feminism. Her next volume of poems, The Harp Weaver (1923), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Millay married Eugen Boissevain, the widower of Inez Milholland, in 1923. Both were believers in free-love and it was agreed they should have an open marriage. Boissevain managed Millay's literary career and this included the highly popular readings of her work. In his autobiography, Homecoming (1933), Floyd Dell commented that he had "never heard poetry read so beautifully".

In 1927 joined with other artists such as John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Dorothy Parker, Ben Shahn, Floyd Dell in the campaign against the proposed execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The day before the execution Millay was arrested at a demonstration in Boston for "sauntering and loitering" and carrying the placard "If These Men Are Executed, Justice is Dead in Massachusetts".

Later Millay was to write several poems about the the Sacco-Vanzetti Case. The most famous of these was Justice Denied in Massachusetts. Her next volume of poems, The Buck and the Snow (1928) included several others including Hangman's Oak, The Anguish, Wine from These Grapes and To Those Without Pity.

In 1931 Millay published, Fatal Interview (1931) a volume of 52 sonnets in celebration of a recent love affair. Edmund Wilson claimed the book contained some of the greatest poems of the 20th century. Others were more critical preferring the more political material that had appeared in The Buck and the Snow.

Her next volume of poems, Wine From These Grapes (1934) included the remarkable Conscientious Objector, a poem that expressed her strong views on pacifism. Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939) also dealt with political issues such as the Spanish Civil War and the growth of fascism.

During the Second World War Millay abandoned her pacifists views and wrote patriotic poems such as Not to be Spattered by His Blood (1941), Murder at Lidice (1942) and Poem and Prayer for an Invading Army (1944). Edna St Vincent Millay died in 1950.

(3) Edna St. Vincent Millay, Justice Denied in Massachusetts (1927)

Let us abandon then our gardens and go home And sit in the sitting-room. Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under the cloud? Sour to the fruitful seed Is the cold earth under this cloud, Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot conquer; We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them.

Let us go home, and sit in the sitting-room. Not in our day Shall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before, Beneficent upon us Out of the glittering bay, And the warm winds be blown inward from the sea Moving the blades of corn With a peaceful sound. Forlorn, forlorn, Stands the blue hay-rack by the empty mow. And the petals drop to the ground, Leaving the tree unfruited. The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed uprooted - We shall not feel it again. We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.

What from the splendid dead We have inherited - Furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued - See now the slug and the mildew plunder. Evil does not overwhelm The larkspur and the corn; We have seen them go under.

Let us sit here, sit still, Here in the sitting-room until we die; At the step of Death on the walk, rise and go; Leaving to our children's children this beautiful doorway, And this elm, And a blighted earth to till With a broken hoe.

(4) Edna St. Vincent Millay, Conscientious Objector (1931)

I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death. I hear him leading his horse out of the stall; I hear the clatter on the barn-floor. He is in haste; he has business in Cuba, business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning. But I will not hold the bridle while he clinches the girth. And he may mount by himself: I will not give him a leg up.

Though he flick my shoulders with his whip, I will not tell him which way the fox ran. With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where the black boy hides in the swamp. I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death; I am not on his pay-roll.

I will not tell him the whereabouts of my friends nor of my enemies either. Though he promise me much, I will not map him the route to any man's door. Am I a spy in the land of the living, that I should deliver men to Death? Brother, the password and the plans of our city are safe with me; never through me Shall you be overcome.

(5) Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sonnet XXVIII, Fatal Interview (1931)

When we are old and these rejoicing veins Are frosty channels to a muted stream, And out of all our burning their remains No feeblest spark to fire us, even in dream, This be our solace: that it was not said When we were young and warm and in our prime, Upon our couch we lay as lie the dead, Sleeping away the unreturning time. O sweet, O heavy-lidded, O my love, When morning strikes her spear upon the land, And we must rise and arm us and reprove The insolent daylight with a steady hand, Be not discountenanced if the knowing know We rose from rapture but an hour ago.

(6) In June 1934, the poet, Arthur Ficke, asked Edna St. Vincent Millay to write down the "five requisites for the happiness of the human race."

A job, - something at which you must work for a few hours every day; An assurance that you will have at least one meal a day for at least the next week; An opportunity to visit all the countries of the world, to acquaint yourself with the customs and their culture; Freedom in religion, or freedom from all religions, as you prefer; An assurance that no door is closed to you, - that you may climb as high as you can build your ladder.

http://capecodhistory.us/genealogy/getperson.php?personID=I8654&tre...