Renascence and Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Her mother happened on an announcement of a poetry contest sponsored by The Lyric Year, a proposed annual anthology. Only through fortunate chance was Millay brought to public notice. New England traditions of self-reliance and respect for education, the Penobscot Bay environment, and the spirit and example of her mother helped to make Millay the poet she became. As for her reading, she reported in a 1912 letter that she was “very well acquainted” with William Shakespeare, John Milton, William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, George Eliot, and Henrik Ibsen, and she also mentioned some fifty other authors. Nicholas, and one of her prize poems was reprinted in a 1907 issue of Current Opinion. From 1906 to 1910 her poems appeared in the famous children’s magazine St. Vincent Millay: “I cannot remember once in the life when you were not interested in what I was working on, or even suggested that I should put it aside for something else.” Millay initially hoped to become a concert pianist, but because her teacher insisted that her hands were too small, she directed her energies to writing. Millay recalled her mother’s support in an entry included in Letters of Edna St. Though the family was poor, Cora Millay strongly promoted the cultural development of her children through exposure to varied reading materials and music lessons, and she provided constant encouragement to excel. Vincent Millay,” notes her biographer Nancy Milford, “became the herald of the New Woman.”įrom the age of eight Millay was reared by her strong, independent mother, who divorced the frivolous Henry Millay and became a practical nurse in order to support herself and her three daughters. But Millay’s popularity as a poet had at least as much to do with her person: she was known for her riveting readings and performances, her progressive political stances, frank portrayal of both hetero and homosexuality, and, above all, her embodiment and description of new kinds of female experience and expression. Like her contemporary Robert Frost, Millay was one of the most skillful writers of sonnets in the twentieth century, and also like Frost, she was able to combine modernist attitudes with traditional forms creating a unique American poetry. She is noted for both her dramatic works, including Aria da capo, The Lamp and the Bell, and the libretto composed for an opera, The King’s Henchman, and for such lyric verses as “Renascence” and the poems found in the collections A Few Figs From Thistles, Second April, and The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Vincent Millay was one of the most successful and respected poets in America. Throughout much of her career, Pulitzer Prize-winner Edna St.

Renascence and Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay