Poetry About Life

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

(First Pulitzer Prize Awarded Woman: "The New Woman")

(1892-1950)

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, on February 22, 1892. Her parents, Cora Lounella and Henry Tolman Millay, divorced when Millay was eight years old. After the breakup, her mother moved Edna and her sisters to Camden, Maine, and raised them on her own. Millay's mother provided for her family by nursing, and by most accounts, she soundly encouraged her daughters' ambitions and ensured for them strong literary and musical backgrounds. In high school, Millay concentrated on literature and theatre, and in 1912, she made her literary debut. Encouraged by her mother, Millay entered a poetry contest sponsored by the literary magazine The Lyric Year, and her long, mystical poem "The Renaissance" instantly caught the eye of Ferdinand Earle, one of the contest's judges. Earle persuaded Millay to change the poem's title to "Renascence," and although it only ranked fourth overall, the poem was published in The Lyric Year that November. The poem earned Millay a scholarship to Vassar as well as acclaim from many prominent literary figures, including Witter Bynner.

Millay in front of Washington's Arch (1938)

At Vassar, Millay (whom close friends called "Vincent") continued to write and publish poetry and remained active in theatre. In 1917, the year of her graduation, she published her first book of poetry, Renascence and Other Poems. Also while at Vassar, Millay began having intimate relationship with several women, including the English actress Wynne Matthison, and from this point forward would live more or less openly bisexual. Her second book of poetry, A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), dealt uninhibitedly with feminist issues and lesbian sentiments, as did the first of her three lyric plays, The Lamp and the Bell, which was commissioned by Vassar and published in 1921. With college behind her, Millay placed herself in the centre of New York City's bohemian neighborhood, Greenwich Village. She continued both her poetry and drama writing and was heralded as the voice of her generation. The Harp Weaver and Other Poems, her fourth book of poetry, was published in 1923 and won the Pulitzer Prize, the first to be awarded to a woman for poetry. She also began seeing a number of male lovers at this time, including a man named Floyd Dell, who tried unsuccessfully to quell her lesbian tendencies and obtain her hand in marriage. In 1923, she did marry�but not to Dell. After returning from two years in Europe as a correspondent for Vanity Fair, Millay wed a man named Eugen Jan Boissevain.

Millay, by William Zorach (ink, charcoal, pencil)

Many surmise that Boissevain's successful turn at publicizing Millay's poetry may have been one motivation for their sexually open marriage, and Boissevain continued to manage Millay's career until his death in 1949. Millay died one year later in her home in Austerlitz, New York. In later years, a political awareness and a mature, tender tone replaced the fashionably cynical touch of Millay's early lyrics, but she will always be remembered as the prototypical reckless, self-determined, romantic "New Woman".

"Millay became a diva of the sonnet, publishing some of he sexiest, wisest, most passionate, and mot feminist poetry of the twentieth century, each a rhythmical, sometimes whimsical, sometimes savagely intense fourteen lines" (Molly Peacock).

RECUERDO