Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American lyrical poet and playwright, born Edna Vincent Millay in Rockland, Maine, on February 22, 1892. In New York City during the Roaring Twenties and after, she became a widely known social figure and a noted feminist. She also wrote prose under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd. Her public life joined literary fame, defiance of convention, and a gift for traditional poetic forms at a time when modernist writers were urging artists to “make it new.”

Millay’s early life was marked by talent, poverty, and a strong-willed household. Her mother, Cora Lounella Buzelle, was a custom hair stylist and training nurse; her father, Henry Tolman Millay, was a life insurance agent and teacher who later became a superintendent of schools. Cora divorced him in 1904 for improvidence and domestic abuse, and she raised Edna, Norma, and Kathleen while moving from town to town. She carried a trunk of classic literature, including Shakespeare and Milton, and read to her daughters. Millay, who called herself “Vincent,” was encouraged to read the classics at home, though she was too rebellious to thrive in formal schooling.

Her literary gifts appeared early. At 14 she won the St. Nicholas Gold Badge for poetry, and by 15 she had published poems in St. Nicholas, the Camden Herald, and Current Literature. Her first major public notice came in 1912, when her poem “Renascence” placed fourth in a contest for The Lyric Year. The result drew press attention because the Millays were working-class women living in poverty, and because all three winners were men. Some observers saw sexism and classism in the outcome. The controversy helped launch her career, and arts patron Caroline B. Dow, after hearing Millay recite and play piano in Camden, offered to pay for her education at Vassar College.

Millay entered Vassar in 1913 at age 21. She found its strict expectations hard to bear after a more liberal home life that had included smoking, drinking, playing gin rummy, and flirting with men. Still, she became a prominent campus writer and a regular contributor to The Vassar Miscellany. Near graduation in 1917, the faculty voted to suspend her indefinitely, but a petition by her peers allowed her to graduate. During her college years she kept scrapbooks that included drafts of plays, and she had romantic relationships with women, including Edith Wynne Matthison, who later became a silent-film actress.

After Vassar, Millay moved to Greenwich Village, then becoming known as a bohemian writers’ haven. She lived in several places in New York City, including 75½ Bedford Street, known as the narrowest house in the city. She formed relationships with men and women, and counted writers Witter Bynner, Arthur Davison Ficke, and Susan Glaspell among her close friends. In 1919 she wrote the anti-war play Aria da Capo, which starred her sister Norma Millay. In 1923, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for “Ballad of the Harp-Weaver,” becoming the first woman and the second person to receive that award. In 1943, she became the sixth person and the second woman to receive the Frost Medal for lifetime contribution to American poetry.

Millay was highly regarded for much of her lifetime. Literary critic Edmund Wilson 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.” By the 1930s, modernist critics began to dismiss her work for its traditional forms and subject matter. Later, feminist literary criticism in the 1960s and 1970s renewed interest in her writing. Her poems and plays remain compelling because they come from a life lived with sharp feeling, independence, and open resistance to the limits placed on women, artists, and desire.