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 Edna St.
Vincent Millay [Millay’s Poems]
1892-1950
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.
Source:
www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=161
http://members.aol.com/MillayGirl/millay.htm
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