About Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was born in Rockland, Maine, on February 22. Her mother, Cora Louella, a nurse, raised her four daughters on her own after asking her husband, Henry Tolman Millay, a schoolteacher, to leave the family home. Wher parents divorced when she was about eight, she stayed with her mother. 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. In 1917 she graduated from Vassar.

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. Meanwhile she earned her living with pseudonymous magazine sketches, published under the name Nancy Boyd and collected in Distressing Dialogues in 1924. 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 frank and cynical love poetry which drew much attention for its controversial descriptions of female sexuality and feminism.

Soon Edna St. Vincent Millay was hailed as the voice of her generation, the embodiment of the New Woman. After two years in Europe as a correspondent for Vanity Fair, she married Eugene Jan Boissevain, a self-proclaimed feminist, in 1923. Millay had earlier devoted a sonnet to the memory of his first wife, her suffragist idol Inez Milholland. 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.

In 1923 she also became the first woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for Ballad of the Harp Weaver, her fourth volume of poems. At the height of her popularity, she joined a writer's crusade to stay the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. She commemorated their end in five poems, "Justice Denied in Massachusetts", "Hangman's Oak", "The Anguish", "To Those Without Pity", and "Wine from These Grapes" (collected in The Buck in the Snow in 1928).

After more volumes of lyrics came a joint translation with George Dillon of Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal in 1936; Conversation at Midnight, a dramatic verse colloquoy showing her increasing political awareness, in 1937; and Huntsman, What Quarry? in 1939 (which included six elegiac poems to her close friend Elinor Wylie, who died in 1928). 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).

With the approach and onset of World War II, Millay became increasingly alarmed at the rise of fascism in Europe, and participated in a number of public forums promoting US preparedness and involvement. She also published Make Bright the Arrows: 1940 Notebook in 1940, which consisted of "poems for a world at war." Millay wrote The Murder of Lidice, her 1942 radio play, at the request of the Writer's War Board. Collected Lyrics, Collected Sonnets, and Collected Poems appeared in 1939, 1941, and 1956.

Millay's letters, located at Vassar and elsewhere, were published in 1952, edited by her close friend Allan Ross MacDougal. Millay died of heart failure at her home, Steepletop, in Austerlitz, New York, in October, 1950.

Most information from The Feminist Companion to Literature in English. Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements, eds. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

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 Comment by Edmund Wilson

I had found, when I had come into contact with the formidable strength of character that lay behind Millay's attractiveness and brilliance, something as different as possible from the legend of her Greenwich Village reputation, something austere and even grim. She had grown up in small Maine towns. I heard her speak of her father only once. He and her mother had not lived together since the children were quite small, and her mother, who had studied to be a singer, supported them by district nursing. They were poor; the mother was away all day, and the three girls were thrown much on themselves. To Edna, her sisters and her poetry and her music must have been almost the whole of life.

By her precocious and remarkable poem, Renascence, written when she was hardly nineteen, she had attracted the attention of Miss Caroline B. Dow, the New York head of the National Training School of the YWCA, who raised the money to send Millay to college. She did not graduate, therefore, till she was twenty-five, when she at last emerged into the freedom of a world where her genius and beauty were soon to make her famous, to bring all sorts of people about her, with an intellect and a character that had been developed in solitude and under the discipline of hard conditions. It was this tough intellectual side combined with her feminine attraction that later, in Greenwich Village made her such an attraction, and persuaded so many men that they had found their ideal mate. She was quite free from the blue-stocking's showing-off, but she did have a rather schoolmarmish side which rapped Vincent Sheean's knuckles when he put out a cigarette in his coffee cup.

Edmund Wilson, "Epilogue, 1952: Edna St. Vincent Millay," in The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the 1920s and 1930s. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1952.