The Sheila Variations: National Poetry Month: Edna St. Vincent Millay

April 24, 2007

National Poetry Month: Edna St. Vincent Millay

I've always loved Edna St. Vincent Millay's stuff - she is one of those rarest of creatures: a poet who is a celebrity in her day. There was obviously something about her that packed audiences into halls to hear her read. People describe how she read her own poems - and it sounds like theatre. Like the stories of hearing Anne Sexton read her own stuff. I read a biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay and found her to be self-absorbed, narcissistic, coy - and ruthless. An interesting combination. I didn't like her very much. And I also felt kind of in awe - at someone who so clearly only lived by her own rules. She was a woman, of a certain time. That didn't come into her thinking at ALL. She was a siren. I found her fascinating. She was a phenom - from very early on, her gift of verse was recognized. This was not a woman who suffered in obscurity. No. People read her stuff, powerful people, and immediately set out to help her, introduce her to the right people, set her up so that she could be a success. It's quite an extraordinary life story.

This is my favorite of her sonnets.

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go, -- so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

"In October 1934, Edna Millay read at Yale. A young graduate student, Richard Sewell, who forty years later would become the biographer of Emily Dickinson, never forgot the impression she made that night. Walking to the center of Woolsey Hall, wrapped in a long black velvet cloak, her bright hair shining, she "stood before us," he remembered, "like a daffodil." Looking at her wrist, she told the audience that the poems she was about to read were from her new book, Wine From These Grapes, "which is coming off the press just about now." That night she read with the zeal of a young Jeremiah, her words burning the air as she closed her reading with a sonnet from 'The Epitaph for the Race of Man'. Tickets for her readings were wildly sought whether she was in Oklahoma City or Chicago, where the hall seating 1,600 was sold out and even with standees an extra hall had to be taken for the overflow of another 800 who listened to her over amplifiers." -- Nancy Milford, "Savage Beauty"

"For instance, they had shades at their window and nothing else. I don't think they cared much. Well, once they stenciled apple blossoms, painted that pattern down the sides of the window. Or, for instance, they had a couple of plum trees in their backyard, and they never waited for the plums to ripen, but would pick them green, put them in vinegar, and call them 'mock olives.' Well, no one else did that sort of thing in Camden, don't you see?" -- Lena Dunbar, neighbor of the Millay family

"The poem seems to us to be phenomenal." -- Edward J. Wheeler, editor of "Current Literature", on Edna's poem 'The Land of Romance' - written when she was 14

"We have named the little one Edna Vincent Millay. Don't you think that is pretty? ... the Vincent is for the 'St. Vincent' Hospital, the one that cared so well for our darling brother. Nell woudl have called it 'Vincent' if it had been a boy." -- Cora Millay on the birth of her first daughter, on George Washington's birthday

"-- oh, this was life! It was more than life, -- it was art. I might pretend to myself [at home] as much and as long as I liked, -- until the deep-vibrant note I had discovered in my voice ... out-Hedda-ed Nazimova -- yet was my native village unthrilled and unconvinced; I was asked to serve ice-cream at church socials, and the grocer-boy called me by name ..." -- Edna St. Vincent Millay on her first job as an actress in a traveling stock company

"Boys don't like me anyway because I won't let them kiss me. It's just like this: let boys kiss you and they'll like you but you won't ... But I'd be almost willing to be engaged if I thought it would keep me from being lonesome ... if I was engaged I would be going to the play tonight instead of sitting humped up on the steps in a drizzle that keeps my pencil point sticky. I'd be going out paddling tomorrow instead of practicing the Beethoven Funeral March Sonata. And I'd like to have something to do besides write in an old book. I'd like to have something happen to give me a jolt, something that would rattle my teeth and shake my hairpins out." -- Edna St. Vincent Millay, in her journal, 1911

"The most astonishingly beautiful and original poem in The Lyric Year, the poem most arresting in its vision, the poem most like a wonderful Pre-Raphael painting, is surely Renascence by Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay. To me it almost unthinkable that a girl of twenty could conceive such a work and execute it with such vigor and tenderness ... And it is with no small pride that I give it my first vote for the prizes." -- Ferdinand Earle, 1912