A wealthy patron paid her way at Vassar, and she was off. That year she wrote in her diary, “I do not think there is a woman in whom the roots of passion shoot deeper than in me.” She was elected to the Poetry Society of America, and befriended Louis Untermeyer and Teasdale. When the editors realized the poem had been written by a 20-year-old “girl” from Maine with no college education, she became a cause célèbre. If I should stop for awhile everything would go to smash things would boil over and burn.” She is a young female genius trapped in a small town, with no parental protection, no money and no hope of rescue.įinally, in 1912, Millay received national recognition when her poem “Renascence” was published in an important anthology. … What’s the good of books and poems? I don’t get any time to read. “I want to climb Megunticook before the leaves are all gone,” she writes in a despondent October 1911 entry. Desperate for beauty, she awakens before dawn to watch the sunrise she steals a few moments to listen to birdsong and she writes miserably to an imaginary male lover who seems to have walked out of a Coleridge poem. When Cora is away, Millay’s days are a blur of scrubbing, ironing, cooking and child care. If I should stop for awhile everything would go to smash things would boil over and burn.’īut loneliness and exhaustion take a toll. She agrees to teach a Sunday school class in exchange for a copy of Omar Khayyám’s “Rubaiyat.” ‘I don’t get any time to read. She calls Henry David Thoreau’s prose “as invigorating as a salt sea-wind” and joins a “girls’ Mark Twain reading club,” the Huckleberry Finners. Vincent Millay and buys a collection of Robert Browning poems with her prize money. Her teenage diaries offer glimpses of her precocious talent: She enters poetry contests as E. Millay hoped early on that she might lift herself, and perhaps her whole family, out of poverty with her writing. Three of the Millay women would eventually become published poets. Hardship bound them close they liked to compare themselves to the March family in “Little Women.” Cora was herself a gifted writer and musician, and gave her girls an impressive literary and musical education. After Millay’s parents divorced, her mother, Cora, worked as a traveling nurse to support three young daughters. She grew up in poverty in Newburyport, Mass., and Camden, Maine. It’s something of a miracle that Millay was published at all. And indeed, Millay’s best work - with its coy rhymes, bravado and playful sexual politics - deserves a contemporary reassessment. Their editor, Daniel Mark Epstein, hopes this landmark publication will revive interest in Millay’s daring, transgressive verse. Now, 72 years after her death, Yale University Press has published Millay’s diaries nearly in full. The poet Maxine Kumin remembered her Harvard professors dismissing Millay as “just a sentimental woman” in the mid-1940s. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” The modernists won the day, and the discrete, imagistic verse of Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore eventually crowded out the more decadent, romantic lyrics of Millay and Sara Teasdale. Millay’s wildly popular love sonnets suddenly seemed quaint when set beside the oblique and somber lines of T.S. But not long after World War I, modernist poets began rejecting rigid rhyme, meter and expressions of emotion. Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923, and at the height of her fame she seemed unstoppable. 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! Her 1920 poem “First Fig” became an anthem for a generation tired of Victorian mores: She was the female voice of the Jazz Age, the New Woman incarnate whose passionate and iconoclastic verse earned her a devoted following. Her collections sold tens of thousands of copies, and her readings filled theaters from New York to Texas. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was once the most famous poet in America. Vincent Millay Edited by Daniel Mark EpsteinĮdna St. RAPTURE AND MELANCHOLY The Diaries of Edna St.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |