In Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Diaries, the Private Life of a Celebrity Poet

RAPTURE AND MELANCHOLY
The Diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edited by Daniel Mark Epstein

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was as soon as probably the most well-known poet in America. Her collections bought tens of 1000’s of copies, and her readings stuffed theaters from New York to Texas. She was the feminine voice of the Jazz Age, the New Lady incarnate whose passionate and iconoclastic verse earned her a faithful following. Her 1920 poem “First Fig” turned an anthem for a technology uninterested in Victorian mores:

My candle burns at each ends;
It is not going to final the evening;
However ah, my foes, and oh, my buddies—
It provides a stunning gentle!

Millay gained the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923, and on the top of her fame she appeared unstoppable. However not lengthy after World Conflict I, modernist poets started rejecting inflexible rhyme, meter and expressions of emotion. Millay’s wildly standard love sonnets out of the blue appeared quaint when set beside the indirect and somber strains of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” The modernists gained the day, and the discrete, imagistic verse of Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore finally crowded out the extra decadent, romantic lyrics of Millay and Sara Teasdale. The poet Maxine Kumin remembered her Harvard professors dismissing Millay as “only a sentimental girl” within the mid-Nineteen Forties.

Now, 72 years after her loss of life, Yale College Press has revealed Millay’s diaries practically in full. Their editor, Daniel Mark Epstein, hopes this landmark publication will revive curiosity in Millay’s daring, transgressive verse. And certainly, Millay’s greatest work — with its coy rhymes, bravado and playful sexual politics — deserves a recent reassessment.

It’s one thing of a miracle that Millay was revealed in any respect. She grew up in poverty in Newburyport, Mass., and Camden, Maine. After Millay’s dad and mom divorced, her mom, Cora, labored as a touring nurse to help three younger daughters. Hardship certain them shut; they appreciated to match themselves to the March household in “Little Ladies.” Cora was herself a gifted author and musician, and gave her women a formidable literary and musical training. Three of the Millay ladies would finally turn out to be revealed poets.