Millay, Edna St. Vincent

Millay, Edna St. Vincent (1892–1950),born in Maine, graduated from Vassar (1917) having already won fame with the publication of “Renascence” (1912), the title poem of her first volume, Renascence and Other Poems (1917), which exhibited technical virtuosity, startling freshness, and a hunger for beauty. A Few Figs from Thistles (1920) showed that though the disillusion of the postwar years was crowding in upon her, she was attempting to maintain gaiety with a consciously cynical flippancy. With Second April (1921) she revealed a more mature emotional tone, which, like her use of Elizabethan words and tight metrical forms, marked her subsequent volumes. While living in Greenwich Village, she became associated with the Provincetown Players, for whom she wrote The Princess Marries the Page (1918, published in 1932), Aria da Capo (1919, published 1921), and Two Slatterns and a King (1921), all one‐act satirical fantasies. The Lamp and the Bell (1921), written for a Vassar commencement, is a five‐act poetic drama. The Ballad of the Harp‐Weaver (1923, Pulitzer Prize), later retitled The Harp‐Weaver and Other Poems, is noted for poems showing a further deepening from her earlier arch attitude to a more disillusioned bitterness. Her mature technical ability, particularly in the sonnet, her lyric gift, and her directness were exhibited in further volumes: The Buck in the Snow (1928); Fatal Interview (1931), a sonnet cycle in the Elizabethan manner; Wine from These Grapes (1934); Conversations at Midnight (1937), a dramatic narrative showing her increasing interest in contemporary social problems; Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939); Make Bright the Arrows (1940), “poems for a world at war”; and The Murder of Lidice (1942), a ballad written for radio. Her Collected Sonnets appeared in 1941, Collected Lyrics in 1943, and Collected Poems in 1956. Other works include Distressing Dialogues (1924), a volume of sophisticated prose sketches, written under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd; The King's Henchman (1927), the libretto of an opera by Deems Taylor, set in Saxon England; and a translation of Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil (1936) with George Dillon. Mine the Harvest (1954) posthumously collects 66 poems, and her Letters was published in 1952.