MILLAY, Edna St. Vincent

MILLAY, Edna St. Vincent (b. 22 February 1892; d. 18 October 1950), poet.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, born to Cora and Henry Millay in Rockland, Maine, was the oldest of three daughters (her sisters were Norma and Kathleen). Her father was sent away by her mother when she was eight. Her mother went to work as a nurse to support herself and her girls, who, left on their own, developed both the independence and the strong mutual bonds that would characterize their relationships in the future. Millay, called not Edna but "Vincent," earned early notice as a poet with childhood successes, including publications in St. Nicholas children's magazine.

Her first great triumph, the long poem Renascence, elicited much comment when it appeared in the 1912 Lyric Year. Critic Jessie Rittenhouse thought the poem "the freshest, most distinctive in the book" (Milford, p. 76). At age twenty, Millay was a girl who wrote like a man, "a brawny male," Arthur Davidson Ficke joked. Impressed by her talent, her mentor Caroline B. Dow sent Millay to Vassar College.

During the Vassar years, Millay participated widely in theatrical and literary life, developing a performative style that would later structure her poetry and her readings as she became both the most well-known female poet and the representative "new woman" of the 1920s. She edited the Vassar Miscellany Monthly, which published some poems she had written earlier, such as "The Suicide" and "Interim." The years at Vassar were marked by strong female friendships and also by a legacy of strong poems about women, such as the "Memorial to D. C." that prefigured a later six-poem sequence written for Elinor Wylie.

At Vassar, she had a long and intense relationship with Elaine Ralli. Both of Millay's recent biographers, Nancy Milford and Daniel Epstein, portray her as involved in a number of lesbian relationships, perhaps beginning with her sisters. The very icon of free love, Millay had many sexual encounters with both male and female partners—some of them quite transitory, and all within the framework of a capacity to arouse passionate attachments that sometimes created bitterness and grief.

As the culture of the moderns developed in Greenwich Village, Millay was in the middle of it, wildly popular, involved with the Provincetown Players, writing plays, and reciting poems that college students knew by heart long before they were published. With a memorable presence, she attracted serious attention from a number of admirers, male and female, some of whom found it hard to get over her. Critic and lover Edmund Wilson was one of those. After Millay died, Wilson's 1952 "Epilogue" in his The Shores of Light called her an "exceptional being." "One never forgot the things she noticed, for she charged them with her own intense feeling" (p. 745). He thought her perhaps more interested in the poetic emotion her affairs aroused than in the individuals.

Millay was especially well-known for her intense poetry about love, often defiant love, like the entire volume titled A Few Figs from Thistles (1920). She reversed the expectations of female poets in many respects. Sometimes she played with the gender of her persona, speaking in a voice that would have seemed masculine to her readers, addressing a lover as "she." Even the casual flippancy of "First Fig" was decidedly unfeminine: "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!" (Millay, p. 19). In perfectly formed sonnets, she theatricalized identity.

Millay's politics were progressive. She supported feminists and wrote a commemorative sonnet (Numberlxvii) on behalf of equal rights for women. She demonstrated against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, protesting to the governor in a personal letter that he ought to stay the execution, and then wrote not only a protest poem, "Justice Denied in Massachusetts," and sonnets dedicated to them, but also an essay, "Fear," accusing readers of fearing anarchists when they ought rather to fear injustice. She helped make the United States tour of Emma Goldman possible in the thirties.

Perhaps in part because of her immense popularity, Millay came under attack. John Crowe Ransom's "The Poet as Woman" (1937) implied that her femininity had undermined her critical faculties. As a Poundian "make it new" aesthetic came to prevail, her very success in renewing the formal musicality of the sonnet tradition worked against her. Married to Eugen Jan Boissevain, she wrote from their farm at Steepletop, New York. But her extraordinary ability to make poetic language call attention to the experiences of everyday life and the drama of plants, birds, hills, and seasons shared little with the difficult poetics of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, or Wallace Stevens. Furthermore, like others who made gender identity and sexuality central to their stylistic work, Millay lost credibility with modernist and Cold War critics who demanded more universality.

Nonetheless, there is now renewed interest in Millay, and two major biographies appeared in 2001. Her incorporation of both musicality and drama into poetic style and her mastery of form make her one of the chief lyric poets of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Clark, Suzanne. "Jouissance and the Sentimental Daughter: Edna St. Vincent Millay." In Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

Epstein, Daniel Mark. The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

Freedman, Diane, ed. Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995.

Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Random House, 2001.

Millay, Edna St.Vincent. The Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Edited by Allan Ross Macdougall. New York: Grossett and Dunlap, 1952.

——. Selected Poems: The Centenary Edition. Edited by Colin Falck. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

Ransom, John Crowe. "The Poet as Woman." Southern Review 2 (Spring 1937): 784.

Wilson, Edmund."Epilogue, 1952: Edna St.Vincent Millay. "In The Shores of Light. New York: Random House, 1952.

Suzanne Clark

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