Edna St. Vincent Millay

Titles in Poetry category:

• Second April

  To what purpose, April, do you return again?
  Beauty is not enough.
  You can no longer quiet me with the redness
  Of little leaves opening stickily.
  I know what I know.
  The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
  The spikes of the crocus.
  The smell of the earth is good.
  ...

About the Author

American poet and dramatist, who became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for The Harp-Weaver, and Other Poems (1922). The title work was a tribute to her selfless and encouraging mother. Millay's unconventional life in Greenwich Village in the 1920s embodied the spirit of the New Woman - sexual freedom, independence, and political activism.

Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly
In my own way, and with my full consent.
If I had loved you less or played you slyly
I might have held you a summer more,
But at the cost of words I value highly ...
(from 'Sonnet XLVII', in Fatal Interview, 1931)

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, as the daughter of Henry Tolman Millay, a school principal, and Cora Lounella (Buzzelle) Millay. (Millay's middle name derived from the French priest St. Vincent de Paul) Her father had a weakness for poker playing, and although he deserted his family, Millay kept contact with him. After divorce in 1900 Cora Millay moved with her three daughters, Edna, Norma, and Kathleen, to Camden, into a small house in the poorest part of the town. To support her family she worked as a district nurse and was often away on assignment. Trained to be a singer, she coached town orchestras and wrote out scores for their members. She also encouraged her daughters in their musical and poetic ambitions, and taught Edna to write poetry at the age of five.

"She was small and frail for a twelve-year-old," Edna's teacher at the Elm Street grammar school described her. "Her mane of red hair and enormous gray-green eyes added to the impression of frailty, and her stubborn mouth and chin made her seem austere, almost to the point of grimness." At Camden High School Edna was a promising student. However, after leaving school she remained at home. Her first published poem, 'Forest Trees', appeared in St. Nicholas, an illustrated children's magazine, when she was fourteen.

Her first major poem, 'Renascence, was published in the anthology The Lyric Year for 1912. It was judged only the fourth-best submitted, but with this work Millay gained an instant fame. In 'Renascence' the poet lies on her back and looks at the sky. She has a mystic, nearly ecstatic vision of infinity, which comes down and settles over her. "I saw and heard, and knew at last / The How and Why of all things, past, / And present, and forevermore. The Universe, cleft to the core, / Lay open to my probing sense, / That, sickening, I would fain pluck thence / But could not, - nay! needs must suck / At the great would, and could not pluck / My lips away till I had drawn / All venom out. - Ah, fearful pawn: For my omniscience paid I toll / In infinite remorse of soul."

Millay was forced to work during her school years. When Carolyn B. Dow of the National Training School of the YWCA took her as her protegée, she was able to go to college. After preparatory work at Barnard College, she entered Vassar, receiving her B.A. in 1917. During this period she wrote for Smart Set, Poetry, and other magazines. In Vassar Millay also had affairs with women. 'People fall in love with me," she noted, "and annoy me and distress me and flatter me and excite me.'' Her play, The Princess Marries the Page, was performed by Vassar students in 1917, and in the same year appeared her first collection of poems, Renascence, and Other Poems. After graduation she moved to New York and settled in Greenwich Village, where she associated with many of the prominent artists, writers and political radicals, including the poet Wallace Stevens, the playwright Eugene O'Neil, and the left-wing journalist John Reed. Among her lovers were the novelist Floyd Dell, the critic Edmund Wilson, John Peale Bishop, who was editor of Vanity Fair, and the poet Arthur Davison Ficke. Later Edmund Wilson portrayed her as the heroine of his novel, I Thought of Daisy (1929).

Although Millay was unconventional in her personal life, she used traditional verse forms - ballads and sonnets - and her love poems describing her affairs were not especially erotic. She also exceeded at free verse, starting from Second April (1921), but she never broke with the past like modernists did. In 'Fist Fig' (1920) she wrote: "My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends - / It gives a lovely light!" Under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd she wrote short satirical pieces for magazines. She also played central roles in productions of the Provincetown Players, and wrote for the company Aria da Capo (1920), a pacifist verse play. From 1921 to 1923 Millay traveled in Europe on assignment for Vanity Fair. Her articles were published in book form as Distressing Dialogues (1924). In 1923 Millay married Eugen Jan Boissevain, the widower of Inez Milholland, an early feminist. Boissevain was a Dutch coffee importer 12 years her senior, but he gave up his business, and devoted his full attention to Edna. They traveld in the Far East, and moved in 1925 to a farm in the Berkshires, near Austerlitz, New York. Steepletop, the name of the farm, was Millay's main home for the rest of her life, except when she spent time on an island retreat off the coast of Maine and traveled abroad. In 1928 she went to Paris to meet her lover, George Dillon. This affair inspired Fatal Interview (1931), a sequence of fifty-two sonnets, which sold 50,000 copies within months.

In 1927 Millay joined protesters who were convinced that the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, accused of armed robbery and murder, were victims of miscarriage of justice. They were executed in August; Millay was arrested in Boston during a protest against their death sentence. Deems Taylor's opera, The King's Henchman, for which Millay wrote the libretto, gained in 1927 at the Metropolitan Opera a huge success. In 1929 she was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Millay had made several reading tours from the beginning of her career, but in the early 1930s she started to read poems in her seductive contralto on radio. After a car accident in 1936, she began withdrawing from the public. In 1942 her poem 'The Murder of Lidice,' was beamed by shortwave to in Europe. The Nazis had destroyed the men, women and children of Lidice, a village in Czechoslovakia, after the resistance had assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, a notorious Nazi official. Later Millay said of the ballad, which had been commissioned by the Writers' War Board: "It has some good lines, but not many, and not very good. This piece should be allowed to die along the war which provoked it."

Millay was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1940. Three years later she was awarded the gold medal of the Poetry Society of America. Her last years were sad - she was struggling with a drug addiction and drinking problem. In 1944 she had a nervous breakdown. Her Bohemian life was over, and she felt that her poems were worthless. Boissevain took her to rehabilitation centers, without much success, and when he died of lung cancer in 1949, it was a hard blow to Millay. She died alone at home, on October 19, 1950, after falling down the stairs and breaking her neck. She had been going to bed with the proof pages of Rolfe Humphries's translation of the Aeneid. Posthumously published collection of poems, Mine the Harvest (1954), was edited by Millay's sister Norma.

Millay's poetical voice was intense and bittersweet, passionate but controlled. Her subject matter varied from meditations of nature to feminist commentaries, from love and death to political protest. Like Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), she was a witty observer of human relationships. "We all wandered in after Miss Millay," Parker once wrote. "We were all being dashing and gallant, declaring that we weren't virgins, whether we were or not." The singing quality of her lyrics can be derived from her natural bravura but also from her interest in music - she started to play the piano at an early age, and for a while had considered a concert career. Her love poems, written in spontaneous style and using colloquial language, seem to record her own experiences: "And if I loved you Wednesday, / Well, what it that to you? / I do not love you Thursday - / So much is true." She read much classical poets, like Catullus, and translated poems from French and Spanish into English for her own pleasure. Millay's translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal challenged the view that the French writer was "tortured and idealistic". In her preface Milay wrote that Baudelaire's "flowers of evil" were "flowers of doubt... flowers of grief... forced on the sterile bought of the mind's unblossomy decay."

Author biographies courtesy of Author's Calendar. Used with permission.