A Short Story Of Edna St. Vincent Millay:Edna St. Vincent Millay, born in 1892 in Maine, grew to become one of the premier twentieth-century lyric poets. She was also an accomplished playwright and speaker who often toured giving readings of her poetry. All of that was in her public life, but her private life was equally interesting. An unconventional childhood led into an unconventional adulthood. She was an acknowledged bisexual who carried on many affairs with women, an affection for which is sometimes evident in her poems and plays. She did marry, but even that part of her life was somewhat unusual, with the marriage being quite open, and extramarital affairs, though not documented, are quite probable.
At the young age of seven, Edna's mother asked her husband to leave the family home. After that point he held a negligible role in the girl's life. Edna and her two sisters moved, with their mother, to Newburyport, Massachusetts where, to Edna's delight, she was given piano lessons. Edna (who insisted on being called Vincent and who even entered writing contests under that name) and her sisters were encouraged in their literary and musical leanings by their mother. Then, in highschool, Millay's interests expanded to include theatre. She performed in numerous plays and wrote a Halloween play for her classmates to act out.
Millay enjoyed her free-spirited childhood and adolescence and the creativity that it inspired. At the age of twenty, she entered her poem "Renascence" into a poetry contest for the The Lyric Year, a contest from which 100 poems were to be chosen to be published. It was, at first, overlooked as being too simplistic, however, one of the judges took a second look at it and the poem, now one of her most well known, ended up winning fourth place. It was that poem which really started her on her literary career, beginning with a scholarship to the then all female college of Vassar.
Millay kept up her writing, both poetic and dramatic while at Vassar. It was during this time that she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her book The Harp-Weaver and other Poems.
Millay's first book of poetry, Renascence and Other Poems was published in 1917 and well received. Then A Few Figs from Thistles was published in 1922 and sparked some attention as well as controversy with its feminist leanings. In particular the poems within maintained that the sexual freedom formerly commandeered by men was equally valid for women. This feeling is particularly obvious in the sonnet beginning "What lips my lips have kissed,".
Keep in mind that all of this was accomplished during Millay's college years! After graduation she moved to Greenwich Village in New York, a particularly free-thinking and artistic borough.
In Great Companions, Max Eastman relates an interesting story about Millay that, if true, reveals something of her attitude about own sexuality.
Millay did eventually marry Eugen Boissevain, who managed her career and was a great source of support. The marriage, as mentioned above, was agreed to be open and Millay herself said that they maintained their personal freedom, living more as great friends than as husband and wife. Millay, a smoker in an age of smokers, succumbed to her failure in 1950 at her home, Steepletop, in Austerlitz New York. Boissevain, who was considerably older, had died the previous year.
From Another Collection:
(born Feb. 22, 1892, Rockland, Maine, U.S.—died Oct. 19, 1950, Austerlitz, N.Y.) American poet and dramatist who came to personify romantic rebellion and bravado in the 1920s.
Millay was reared in Camden, Maine, by her divorced mother, who recognized and encouraged her talent in writing poetry. Her first published poem appeared in the St. Nicholas Magazine for children in October 1906. She remained at home after her graduation from high school in 1909, and in four years she published five more poems in St. Nicholas. Her first acclaim came when “Renascence” was included in The Lyric Year in 1912; the poem brought Millay to the attention of a benefactor who made it possible for her to attend Vassar College. She graduated in 1917.In that year Millay published her first book, Renascence and Other Poems, and moved to Greenwich Village in New York City. There she became a lively and admired figure among the avant garde and radical literary set. To support herself Millay, under the pseudonym “Nancy Boyd,” submitted hackwork verse and short stories to magazines, and while her ambition to go on the stage was short-lived, she worked with the Provincetown Players for a time and later wrote the one-act Aria da Capo (1920) for them. The same year she published the verse collection A Few Figs from Thistles, from which the line “My candle burns at both ends” derives. The poem was taken up as the watchword of the “flaming youth” of that era and brought her a renown that she came to despise. In 1921 she published Second April and two more plays, Two Slatterns and a King and The Lamp and the Bell. She also began a two-year European sojourn, during which she was a correspondent for Vanity Fair.Millay won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (1922) and married Eugen Jan Boissevain, a Dutch businessman with whom from 1925 she lived in a large, isolated house in the Berkshire foothills near Austerlitz, New York. In 1925 the Metropolitan Opera Company commissioned her to write an opera with Deems Taylor. The resulting work, The King's Henchman, first produced in 1927, became the most popular American opera up to its time and, published in book form, sold out four printings in 20 days.Millay's youthful appearance, the independent, almost petulant tone of her poetry, and her political and social ideals made her a symbol of the youth of her time. In 1927 she donated the proceeds from her poem “Justice Denied in Massachusetts” to the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti and personally appealed to the governor of the state for their lives. Her major later works include The Buck in the Snow (1928), which introduced a more somber tone to her poetry; Fatal Interview (1931), a highly acclaimed sonnet sequence; and Wine from These Grapes (1934). Her letters were edited by A.R. Macdougall in 1952.The bravado and stylish cynicism of much of Millay's early work gave way in later years to more personal and mature writing, and she produced, particularly in her sonnets and other short poems, a considerable body of intensely lyrical verse. A final collection of her verse appeared posthumously as Mine the Harvest in 1954.
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