Edna St. Vincent Millay
Based on Wikipedia: Edna St. Vincent Millay
In 1912, a twenty-year-old woman from a poor family in Maine entered a poetry contest that would change American literature. The judge, Ferdinand Earle, was so overwhelmed by the thousands of submissions that he devised a brutal efficiency: he would read only the first two lines of each poem before moving on. When he reached Edna St. Vincent Millay's entry, "Renascence," he stopped. He read the whole thing. Then he wrote to tell her she had won.
He was wrong. Or rather, he was overruled.
The other judges had their own ideas about what poetry should accomplish. They wanted social relevance, gritty urban realism. "Renascence" was too lyrical, too personal. A poem about squalid scenes on New York's Lower East Side took first place instead. Millay came in fourth.
The backlash was immediate and fierce. Newspapers ran editorials. The first-place winner received hate mail. He publicly admitted he thought Millay's poem was better. "The award was as much an embarrassment to me as a triumph," he said, and refused to attend the awards ceremony. The second-place winner offered Millay his prize money. And a wealthy arts patron who heard Millay reciting poetry at a hotel in Camden, Maine, was so impressed that she offered to pay for Millay's entire education at Vassar College.
Sometimes losing is the best thing that can happen to you.
A Trunk Full of Shakespeare
Edna St. Vincent Millay was born on February 22, 1892, in Rockland, Maine. Her unusual middle name came from St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City, where her uncle's life had been saved from a maritime accident just before her birth. Her parents were Cora Buzelle, a nurse and hair stylist, and Henry Tolman Millay, a schoolteacher and insurance agent.
In 1904, when Edna was twelve, Cora divorced Henry for financial irresponsibility and domestic abuse. The marriage had effectively ended years earlier. Henry would exchange letters with his daughter for the rest of his life, but he never returned to the family.
What followed was a childhood of poverty and wandering. Cora took her three daughters—Edna (who insisted on being called "Vincent"), Norma, and Kathleen—from town to town across Maine. They scraped by. They survived various illnesses. But Cora traveled with a trunk full of classic literature: Shakespeare, Milton, the great poets. She read to her daughters constantly.
This was Millay's real education.
The family eventually settled in Camden, Maine, in a small house that sat, as one description put it, "between the mountains and the sea where baskets of apples and drying herbs on the porch mingled their scents with those of the neighboring pine woods." It was here that Millay began writing the poems that would make her famous.
The three Millay sisters were independent and outspoken, which didn't always go over well with authority figures. Edna's grade school principal, offended by her frank attitude, refused to call her Vincent. Instead, he called her by any woman's name that started with V. She didn't care. By fourteen, she had won her first poetry prize. By fifteen, her work was appearing in St. Nicholas magazine, the Camden Herald, and the anthology Current Literature.
Hell-Hole
Millay entered Vassar College in 1913 at age twenty-one, older than most freshmen thanks to the years it took to secure funding. She hated it. She called it a "hell-hole."
The problem was simple: before college, Millay had lived freely. She smoked, drank, played cards, flirted with men. Vassar expected its students to behave like refined young ladies. Millay was not a refined young lady.
She was, however, a brilliant writer, and the faculty knew it. When she broke rules, she often escaped formal punishment out of respect for her talent. Still, by the end of her senior year in 1917, the faculty had had enough. They voted to suspend her indefinitely. Her fellow students petitioned for her reinstatement, and she was ultimately allowed to graduate.
At Vassar, Millay had romantic relationships with several women, including Edith Wynne Matthison, who would later become a silent film actress. She kept scrapbooks of plays and poems. She became a regular contributor to the college literary magazine. And she developed the voice that would soon make her one of the most celebrated poets in America.
Greenwich Village
After graduation, Millay moved to New York City and settled in Greenwich Village just as it was becoming the bohemian writers' haven it would be remembered as. She lived in various places, including what was then the narrowest house in New York City, at 75½ Bedford Street. (It measured just nine and a half feet wide.)
Millay was bisexual and had relationships with both men and women during this period. The critic Floyd Dell described her as "a frivolous young woman, with a brand-new pair of dancing slippers and a mouth like a valentine." Both Dell and the literary critic Edmund Wilson proposed marriage to her. She turned them both down.
She was busy. In 1919, she wrote an anti-war play called Aria da Capo, starring her sister Norma, which premiered at the Provincetown Playhouse. In 1923, she helped found the Cherry Lane Theatre "to continue the staging of experimental drama." She took on paid work writing short stories for Ainslee's Magazine, but as an aesthete who carefully guarded her identity as a serious poet, she published this commercial work under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd.
Her 1920 poetry collection A Few Figs from Thistles caused a scandal. It dealt openly with female sexuality and feminist themes. It discussed topics others found taboo—like a wife leaving her husband in the middle of the night. Millay didn't apologize. She went on highly successful nationwide reading tours, drawing enormous crowds who came to hear her recite her own work.
She was becoming a star.
Paris and Its Aftermath
In January 1921, Millay traveled to Paris. She befriended sculptors Thelma Wood and Constantin Brâncuși. She met photographer Man Ray. She had affairs with journalists. She became pregnant.
What happened next was kept quiet for decades. Millay secured a marriage license but never used it. Instead, she went to Dorset, England, where her mother Cora helped induce an abortion using alkanet, an herbal remedy recommended in an old copy of Culpeper's Complete Herbal, a seventeenth-century guide to medicinal plants. Whether as a result of this procedure or for other reasons, Millay was frequently ill and weak for the next four years.
In 1923, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver." She was the first woman to receive the poetry prize. (Two women had won special poetry prizes before the official award was established, but Millay was the first to win the real thing.) The literary critic Harriet Monroe called her "the greatest woman poet since Sappho."
Also in 1923, after a severe illness during which a man named Eugen Jan Boissevain showed her remarkable attention and care, Millay married him. Boissevain was forty-three years old and the widower of Inez Milholland, a labor lawyer and war correspondent whom Millay had admired since her Vassar days. He called himself a feminist. He took on the domestic responsibilities so that Millay could focus on her writing.
Their marriage was unconventional by the standards of the time—and by most standards since. Both Millay and Boissevain had other lovers throughout their twenty-six years together. For Millay, one of the most significant was George Dillon, a poet fourteen years younger whom she met in 1928 when he was a student at the University of Chicago. Their relationship inspired the sonnets in her 1931 collection Fatal Interview.
Steepletop
In 1925, the couple bought a property called Steepletop near Austerlitz, New York. It had once been a 635-acre blueberry farm. They built a barn from a Sears Roebuck kit, then added a writing cabin and a tennis court. Millay grew vegetables in a small garden. Later, they bought Ragged Island in Casco Bay, Maine, as a summer retreat.
The couple frequently had trouble with servants. Millay wrote, with startling frankness, "The only people I really hate are servants. They are not really human beings at all." It's a reminder that even the most progressive artists of an era can hold views that seem shocking in retrospect.
Her career continued to flourish. The Metropolitan Opera House commissioned her to write a libretto for an opera composed by Deems Taylor. The result, The King's Henchman, drew on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's account of Eadgar, King of Wessex. It premiered in 1927 to rave reviews. The New York Times called it "the most effectively and artistically wrought American opera that has reached the stage."
Politics and Pain
In August 1927, Millay was arrested while protesting the impending executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian American anarchists whose murder conviction had become an international cause célèbre. Many believed they had been convicted not for the crime itself but for their radical political beliefs and immigrant status. Millay's prominence allowed her to meet personally with the governor of Massachusetts to plead for a retrial.
She failed. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed on August 23, 1927.
The experience radicalized Millay. She wrote "Justice Denied in Massachusetts" about the case, and her later work increasingly engaged with political themes. She was critical of capitalism and sympathetic to socialist ideals, though she never identified as a communist. In 1941, she told an interviewer she had been "almost a fellow-traveller with the communist idea as far as it went along with the socialist idea."
In May 1936, disaster struck. Millay was staying at the Sanibel Palms Hotel when a kerosene heater on the second floor exploded, starting a fire that destroyed everything—including the only copy of her long verse poem Conversation at Midnight and a rare poetry collection written by the Roman poet Catullus from the first century BC. Millay rewrote Conversation at Midnight entirely from memory and published it the following year.
Months later, she was injured in a car accident when the door of a station wagon swung open and she was thrown into a rocky gully. The fall severely damaged nerves in her spine. She would require frequent surgeries and hospitalizations for the rest of her life, and she needed at least daily doses of morphine to manage the constant pain.
War
Millay had been a dedicated pacifist during World War I. But by 1940, she was so alarmed by the rise of fascism that she reversed her position entirely. She advocated for the United States to enter the war against the Axis powers and became an ardent supporter of the war effort.
She worked with the Writers' War Board to create propaganda, including poetry. This damaged her literary reputation. Critics who had once celebrated her work now dismissed it as compromised by politics. One observer noted the bitter irony: "She seems to have caught more flak from the literary critics for supporting democracy than Ezra Pound did for championing fascism."
In 1942, she published a thirty-two-page poem called "Murder of Lidice." Nazi forces had razed the Czech village of Lidice, slaughtered its male inhabitants, and scattered its surviving residents in retaliation for the assassination of the high-ranking Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich. Millay wrote:
The whole world holds in its arms today
The murdered village of Lidice,
Like the murdered body of a little child.
The poem loosely inspired the 1943 MGM film Hitler's Madman.
Decline
By the 1930s, Millay's critical reputation had begun to decline even as her books continued to sell well. Modernist critics dismissed her work for its use of traditional poetic forms—sonnets, ballads, lyric poetry—in an era when the literary establishment had embraced the modernist imperative to "make it new." She was writing beautiful, accessible poetry at a time when the critical fashion favored difficulty and fragmentation.
Edmund Wilson, who had once proposed marriage to her, had called her "one of the only poets writing in English in our time who have attained to anything like the stature of great literary figures." But fashions change. The avant-garde moved on.
Her constant medical bills didn't help. Neither did the frequent demands from her sister Kathleen, who struggled with mental illness. Despite excellent book sales, Millay spent most of her final years in debt to her own publisher. Biographer Daniel Mark Epstein discovered from her correspondence that she had developed a passion for thoroughbred horse racing and spent much of her income on a racing stable she secretly owned.
Her morphine use, which had begun as medical necessity after her accident, became addiction. She eventually sought treatment and was successfully rehabilitated. But the damage to her health and her reputation had been done.
The End
Eugen Boissevain died of lung cancer in 1949. Millay spent the last year of her life alone at Steepletop.
On October 19, 1950, she fell down the stairs of her home. She was found approximately eight hours later with a broken neck. Her physician reported that she had suffered a heart attack following a coronary occlusion. She was fifty-eight years old.
She was buried alongside her husband at Steepletop.
Her final collection of poems was published posthumously under the title "Mine the Harvest." The title sonnet recalled her career:
Those hours when happy hours were my estate,—
Entailed, as proper, for the next in line,
Yet mine the harvest, and the title mine—
Those acres, fertile, and the furrows straight,
From which the lark would rise—all of my late
Enchantments, still, in brilliant colours, shine
Legacy
For decades after her death, Millay was largely forgotten by the literary establishment. She was dismissed as a relic of a pre-modernist age, a poet who had failed to evolve with the times.
Then the feminist literary criticism of the 1960s and 1970s revived interest in her work. Scholars began to reassess her achievements: her frank exploration of female sexuality and desire, her insistence on women's intellectual and artistic equality, her refusal to apologize for ambition or passion. In 1943, she had received the Frost Medal for lifetime contribution to American poetry—only the sixth person and the second woman to receive the honor.
Today, her poems are read again. Her life is studied. The arc of her career—from the poverty of a Maine childhood to the heights of literary fame to the declining years of pain and debt—contains something universal about the relationship between genius and circumstance, between talent and timing.
She lost that poetry contest in 1912. But the controversy made her famous. A wealthy patron paid for her education. She moved to Greenwich Village at exactly the right moment. She married a man who believed her work mattered more than housekeeping. She lived and wrote on her own terms.
She was, as she herself might have put it, both lucky and unlucky. But mostly, she was herself.