Edna
St Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine on 22nd February, 1892.
Cora St Vincent Millay raised Edna and her three sisters on her own
after her husband left the family home. When Edna was twenty her poem,
Renascence, was published in The
Lyric Year. As a result of this poem Edna won a scholarship
to Vassar.
In 1917, the year of her graduation, Millay published her first book,
Renascence and Other Poems. After
leaving Vassar she moved to New York's Greenwich
Village where she befriended writers such as Floyd
Dell, John Reed and Max
Eastman. The three men were all involved in the left-wing journal,
the Masses, and she joined in their
campaign against USA involvement in the
First World War.
Millay also joined the Provincetown
Theatre Group. Others who wrote or acted for the group included
Floyd Dell, Eugene
O'Neill, John Reed, George
Gig Cook, Susan Glaspell and Louise
Bryant. Millay was considered a great success as Annabelle in
Floyd Dell's The Angel Intrudes.
In 1918 Millay directed and took the lead in her own play, The
Princess Marries the Page. Later she directed her morality
play, Two Slatterns and the King
at Provincetown.
In 1920 Millay published a new volume of poems, A
Few Figs from Thistles. This created considerable controversy
as the poems dealt with issues such as female sexuality and feminism.
Her next volume of poems, The Harp Weaver
(1923), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Millay married Eugen Boissevain, the widower of Inez
Milholland, in 1923. Both were believers in free-love and it was
agreed they should have an open marriage. Boissevain managed Millay's
literary career and this included the highly popular readings of her
work. In his autobiography, Homecoming
(1933), Floyd Dell commented that he had
"never heard poetry read so beautifully".
In 1927 joined with other artists such as John
Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Dorothy
Parker, Ben Shahn, Floyd
Dell in the campaign against the proposed execution of Nicola
Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The
day before the execution Millay was arrested at a demonstration in
Boston for "sauntering and loitering" and carrying the placard
"If These Men Are Executed, Justice is Dead in Massachusetts".
Later Millay was to write several poems about the the Sacco-Vanzetti
Case. The most famous of these was Justice
Denied in Massachusetts. Her next volume of poems, The
Buck and the Snow (1928) included several others including
Hangman's Oak, The
Anguish, Wine from These Grapes
and To Those Without Pity.
In 1931 Millay published, Fatal Interview
(1931) a volume of 52 sonnets in celebration of a recent love affair.
Edmund Wilson claimed the book contained
some of the greatest poems of the 20th century. Others were more critical
preferring the more political material that had appeared in The
Buck and the Snow.
Her next volume of poems, Wine From These
Grapes (1934) included the remarkable Conscientious
Objector, a poem that expressed her strong views on pacifism.
Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939)
also dealt with political issues such as the Spanish
Civil War and the growth of fascism.
During the Second World War Millay abandoned
her pacifists views and wrote patriotic
poems such as Not to be Spattered by His
Blood (1941), Murder at Lidice
(1942) and Poem and Prayer for an Invading
Army (1944). Edna St Vincent
Millay died in 1950.
(1)
Floyd Dell wrote about
Edna St Vincent Millay in his autobiography, Homecoming (1933)
Edna St. Vincent Millay was a person of such many-sided charm
that to know her was to have a tremendous enrichment of one's life,
and new horizons. It was something that one would always be glad to
remember. At eighteen to twenty she wrote Renascence. Never
has the simple beauty of the earth been more poignantly captured in
words that in this girl's poem: never I think, in all poetry.
Edna Millay was to become a lover's poet. But with some of her poems
she was also to give dignity and sweetness to those passionate friendships
between girls in adolescence, where they stand terrified at the bogeys
which haunt the realm of grown-up man-and-woman love, and turn back
for a while to linger in the enchanted garden of childhood.
She had a gift for friendship. People try to draw a distinction between
friendship and love; but friendship had for her all the candor and
fearlessness of love, as love had for her the gaiety and generosity
of friendship.
(2) Max Eastman
wrote about Edna St. Vincent Millay in his book Good Companions.
Millay discussed her recurrent headaches with a psychologist.
He asked her, "I wonder if it has ever occurred to you that you
might perhaps, although you are hardly conscious of it, have an occasional
impulse toward a person of your own sex?" She responded, "Oh,
you mean I'm homosexual! Of course I am, and heterosexual, too, but
what's that got to do with my headache?"
(3)
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Justice Denied in Massachusetts (1927)
Let us abandon then our gardens and go home
And sit in the sitting-room.
Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under the cloud?
Sour to the fruitful seed
Is the cold earth under this cloud,
Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot conquer;
We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them.
Let us go home, and sit in the sitting-room.
Not in our day
Shall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before,
Beneficent upon us
Out of the glittering bay,
And the warm winds be blown inward from the sea
Moving the blades of corn
With a peaceful sound.
Forlorn, forlorn,
Stands the blue hay-rack by the empty mow.
And the petals drop to the ground,
Leaving the tree unfruited.
The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed uprooted
-
We shall not feel it again.
We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.
What from the splendid dead
We have inherited -
Furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued -
See now the slug and the mildew plunder.
Evil does not overwhelm
The larkspur and the corn;
We have seen them go under.
Let us sit here, sit still,
Here in the sitting-room until we die;
At the step of Death on the walk, rise and go;
Leaving to our children's children this beautiful doorway,
And this elm,
And a blighted earth to till
With a broken hoe.
(4) Edna St. Vincent Millay, Conscientious Objector (1931)
I shall die, but
that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall;
I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle
while he clinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself:
I will not give him a leg up.
Though he flick my shoulders with his whip,
I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where
the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death;
I am not on his pay-roll.
I will not tell him the whereabouts of my friends
nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much,
I will not map him the route to any man's door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living,
that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city
are safe with me; never through me Shall you be overcome.
(5)
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sonnet XXVIII, Fatal Interview (1931)
When we are old and these rejoicing veins
Are frosty channels to a muted stream,
And out of all our burning their remains
No feeblest spark to fire us, even in dream,
This be our solace: that it was not said
When we were young and warm and in our prime,
Upon our couch we lay as lie the dead,
Sleeping away the unreturning time.
O sweet, O heavy-lidded, O my love,
When morning strikes her spear upon the land,
And we must rise and arm us and reprove
The insolent daylight with a steady hand,
Be not discountenanced if the knowing know
We rose from rapture but an hour ago.
(6)
In June 1934, the poet, Arthur Ficke, asked Edna St. Vincent Millay
to write down the " five requisites for the happiness of the
human race."
A job, - something at which you must work for a few hours every day;
An assurance that you will have at least one meal a day for at least
the next week; An opportunity to visit all the countries of the world,
to acquaint yourself with the customs and their culture; Freedom in
religion, or freedom from all religions, as you prefer; An assurance
that no door is closed to you, - that you may climb as high as you
can build your ladder.
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