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It was at a party in Greenwich Village, in the spring of 1920, that the critic Edmund Wilson first encountered Edna St. Vincent Millay in the flesh. Wilson, a well-bred graduate of Princeton, was a fan of the twenty-eight-year-old poet’s work—he’d taken to reciting one of her sonnets in the shower—but he was, in her physical presence, overcome. Years later, Wilson described the evening: “She was one of those women whose features are not perfect and who in their moments of dimness may not seem even pretty, but who, excited by the blood or the spirit, become almost supernaturally beautiful.” He remained in love with her for years, even after she’d refused his offer of marriage. It was as if he were enchanted, caught under the “spell” that she cast on “all ages and both sexes.”
This enchantress is the Millay whom many came to know. She was a siren, a seductress, a candle burning with a “lovely light” before being unceremoniously snuffed out. (Millay died at fifty-eight, of a heart attack, after falling down the stairs in her home.) Her appeal was legendary, as was her voice, which the poet Louis Untermeyer described as “the sound of the ax on fresh wood.” In her youth, she loved widely and shamelessly, and she was adored by a generation of young women for the verses she wrote about her transient attachments. Today, she is often remembered as the “poet-girl” of the Roaring Twenties, traipsing from bed to bed in downtown Manhattan, if she is remembered at all.
“Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay” (Yale) aims to capitalize on that salacious reputation. In an introduction, the book’s editor, Daniel Mark Epstein, describes Millay as “the bad girl of American letters,” a “bed-hopping” radical whose escapades rivalled Lord Byron’s. Epstein, a poet himself and the author of a 2001 biography of Millay, has compiled all Millay’s available journals, from her teen-age years on. A foreword by the scholar Holly Peppe, Millay’s literary executor, promises readers a “wild and dangerous ride” filled with “delicious new details” about Millay’s life.
Like so many ardent vows, this is not to be trusted. Millay was an irregular diary keeper; as she wrote in 1927, “This book never gets written in, except when there’s nothing to write.” She didn’t appear to keep a diary at all between 1914 and 1920, the period when her career took off, and Epstein includes fewer than a dozen entries from the seven years after that. The diaries thus shed no light on Millay’s youthful affairs, or on the composition of her reputation-making poems, later collected in “A Few Figs from Thistles” (1920), “Second April” (1921), and “The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems” (1922). Indeed, there is little in the diaries about her creative process, besides an occasional note that she “stayed in bed as usual & worked until noon.” And the most scandalous entries, about her addiction to morphine, will already be familiar to readers of Epstein’s biography or of Nancy Milford’s superior book, “Savage Beauty.”
What the diaries do reveal is that this supposedly ethereal creature was in fact solidly earthbound. As a teen-ager, Millay described the effects of hard domestic labor on her body (“my poor hands are blistered in a dozen places”); later, rich and married, she wrote about the joy she felt “spading & pulling” in her garden. She tracked the changing seasons, dutifully recording the spring’s first bluebird and the comings and goings of herbs. She also recorded mounting bodily ailments: headaches, stomach aches, hangovers, nerve pain in her shoulder and back, exhaustion.
If Millay was a consummate performer, entrancing suitors and selling out lecture halls, the diaries are a record of life offstage. After her marriage, in 1923, her days were quiet—sometimes dull and sometimes lovely—though periodically interrupted by the demands of the public, which threatened to withdraw its affections as literary tastes changed. The diaries do not give us much insight into Millay’s loves and love poems. But they do offer a compelling portrait of what it’s like to live in a mortal, aging body, in a society that insists that its female stars remain beautiful and forever young.
Millay never really had a chance to be a child. Born in 1892 in Rockland, Maine, Vincent, as she was known throughout her childhood, was the eldest of three daughters. Her mother, Cora, a travelling nurse with an artistic streak, divorced her children’s dissolute father in 1901. For a few years, she and the girls moved around New England before finally settling in Camden, Maine, where they rented a small house in “the ‘bad’ section of town,” as Millay later described it. Starting when Millay was nine, Cora would leave home for weeks at a time, while Millay ran the household and cared for her sisters. Cora nurtured Millay’s literary inclinations; when she wasn’t travelling, she read Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” to her daughter. Soon, Millay was sending poems to the children’s publication St. Nicholas and winning cash prizes of five dollars.
Despite the stereotype, poetry and poverty are often incompatible. After Millay graduated from high school, she faced a rather dreary adult life. College was cost-prohibitive, so she began working twelve-hour days at home, cleaning, cooking, washing, and ironing. Her creativity went slack. “I’m getting old and ugly,” she wrote in her diary in October, 1911. “I can feel my face dragging down. I can feel the lines coming underneath my skin. . . . I love beauty more than anything else in the world and I can’t take time to be pretty.” At nineteen, she was lonely. She began writing in her diary to an imaginary lover, and their fantasy assignations broke up the monotony.
It was under these conditions that Millay began to compose “Renascence,” the poem that would change her life. In twenty stanzas of rhyming tetrameter, Millay describes a crisis of faith: a speaker, cramped by a sense of the physical world’s finitude, is suddenly overcome by the forces of “Infinity” and “Eternity,” dies, is buried, longs to return to the world aboveground, and then is reborn with a renewed sense of the soul’s capaciousness. When the poem was published, in 1912, in the anthology “The Lyric Year,” readers were struck by the maturity of its themes. The poet Arthur Ficke, who would become one of Millay’s long-term lovers, wrote to the anthology’s editor in disbelief: “No sweet young thing of twenty ever ended a poem precisely where this one ends: it takes a brawny male of forty-five to do that.”
For all its precocity, the poem can also be understood as a young woman’s effort to reckon with the limitations of a stifling life in Maine. “Renascence” opens with the speaker gazing upon three mountains, like the ones Millay had been climbing all her life:
The repetition at the beginning and the end reinforces the sense of claustrophobia: the speaker is trapped in familiar territory. But, after she’s reborn, the same landscape delights her: “About the trees my arms I wound / Like one gone mad I hugged the ground.” It’s as if Millay were reconciling herself to her circumstances—and realizing, perhaps, that the broader world might be more than she could bear.
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She soon had a chance to see for herself. After Millay recited “Renascence” at a party, one of the guests, impressed by her poise, offered to connect her with friends who could pay her way through Vassar. Millay enrolled in the fall of 1913, and threw herself into campus life, attending parties, starring in plays, and dating several of her wealthier classmates. (Vassar was all female, and romances between young women were common at the time.) She was also rebellious, skipping class to write poems and leaving the Poughkeepsie campus—a “hellhole,” she called it—without permission. Most of the time, her brilliant work saved her from formal sanction; when it didn’t, friends came to her rescue. In 1917, at the end of Millay’s senior year, the faculty voted to suspend her indefinitely. More than a hundred classmates signed a petition, and she was allowed to graduate on time.
For Epstein, Millay was, at this point, like a “princess in a fairytale,” scooped from the ashes and set down among the cultural élite. The diaries, however, show not a princess but a tired young woman with a sensitive stomach: she would run herself ragged trying to write, study, and socialize, and eventually end up “sick abed all day.” This pattern—taking on too many commitments, then suffering the physical consequences—would continue for the rest of her life. Some have seen here evidence of Millay’s frailty or hypochondria, others her need to be fussed over and adored. But gaining adoration—putting her talent and charm to dazzling effect—had brought Millay to college, bought her food and dresses, and won her scholarships. It may well have seemed worth the hangover.
Only six months after graduation, Millay was once again close to broke. She was living with her sister Norma in New York, in a small, cold apartment on West Ninth Street; the pipes froze, as did the flowers Millay brought home to beautify the space. She was acting and writing poems, but the sisters often relied on male suitors to buy their dinners.
In early 1918, Millay wrote to the editor of Poetry, Harriet Monroe, and asked her for advance payment on several poems the magazine planned to publish: “First Fig,” “Second Fig,” and “The Penitent,” among others. The poems appeared in June. “First Fig,” which Norma later called “the most quoted and misquoted quatrain in America,” made Millay’s reputation:
Millay had adopted a carpe-diem attitude—historically, the province of young male poet-roués—and made it her own. Her poems from this era are in praise of the ephemeral: the fleeting attachment, the doomed burst of romantic feeling. “Thursday,” from the same batch of poems, is charmingly insouciant:
Shameless faithlessness, ecstatic passion, skepticism of enduring love: these became Millay’s great themes. In her poetry from the early nineteen-twenties—and, it seems, in her personal life—she explored love’s paradoxes, the way inconstancy can inflame ardor. The poems spoke to her female contemporaries, women who were sexually curious, even active, and sick of pretension. Critics praised her in newspapers and magazines; Monroe, in Poetry, admired “how neatly she upsets the carefully built walls of convention.” Thomas Hardy counted her poetry as one of America’s two great attractions, the other being the skyscraper.
Millay’s genius lay in her ability to infuse old poetic forms with a savvy modern voice. Only she would end a sonnet about the quest for true love by calling it “idle, biologically speaking”—that technical, multisyllabic “biologically” beautifully undercuts any sentimentality. “Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree,” a sequence from 1922, is a sendup of female martyrdom and the institution of marriage. “There was rapture, of a decent kind, / In making mean and ugly objects fair,” Millay writes, of a woman who spends her days cleaning the stove and polishing candlesticks. Decent rapture can’t help but conjure the indecent variety; Millay knew both well.
Even decades after Millay’s death, “Ungrafted Tree” was held in high esteem: the scholar Sandra M. Gilbert called it Millay’s “finest sonnet-sequence.” More recently, though, critics have tended to trip all over themselves to assure readers that they don’t consider Millay significant, or even a particularly good poet. There are several reasons for this overcorrection: an allergy to popular literature, reflexive misogyny, and, perhaps most important, the enduring influence of literary modernism. Modernist poetry was allusive, dense, and difficult, or it was short, cryptic, Imagist. Millay, meanwhile, worked in familiar lyric forms. Certain of her poems could take on a singsong quality, like a child’s nursery rhyme. They were more delightful than intimidating.
But other poems demonstrated Millay’s sophistication. She was not just a master of the sonnet but a student of it. Late in life, she started an essay about the form, naming Shakespeare as an influence, and much of her work evinces a more mature understanding of love. Her sonnets for Ficke, collected in “Second April,” are some of her strongest. In “And you as well must die, beloved dust,” Millay borrows the technique of the blazon, a staple of love poetry by men, to praise her lover’s “flawless, vital hand, this perfect head, / This body of flame and steel.” In these poems and others, Millay, like Shakespeare, plays with gender, assuming an androgynous voice and extolling male beauty without identifying it as such.
Millay wrote her poems for Ficke, who was eight years older, in her twenties. As she imagined their future, it was his beauty that would be “altered, estranged,” his body that would turn to dust. “Have you thought,” she asks in one sonnet, “How in the years to come unscrupulous Time, / More cruel than death, will tear you from my kiss, / And make you old, and leave me in my prime?” A novice poet when they met, she understandably thought herself “a child” and him a “hero grown.” She had many years and many poems ahead of her. But Time would come for the child, too.
During the nineteen-tens and twenties, Millay achieved the kind of fame that was unusual for a poet then and unthinkable now. Before the age of the movie star, she became America’s first starlet. Her books of poems sold out their print runs. She wrote feverishly, working on short stories, plays, a libretto, a novel. She was photographed and interviewed; she was invited to lecture; she won the Pulitzer Prize and became rich. When she published the sonnet sequence “Fatal Interview” (1931), which was inspired by an affair with the much younger poet George Dillon, it sold fifty thousand copies, Great Depression be damned.
But fame is rarely an unmixed blessing for a woman, particularly when it arrives early in life. Like Judy Garland or Britney Spears, Millay had to grow up in public. She was always conscious of her appearance: her diaries show her worrying about being seen without a new dress. At events, the press made sure to comment on her clothing and her figure. “The distinguished young poet . . . resembles more the shy little undergraduate,” one reporter wrote, after attending a reading. (Millay was almost thirty-two at the time.) When she married the Dutch aristocrat and merchant Eugen Jan Boissevain, in a small ceremony in 1923, newspapers around the country covered the event; in New York, three put it on the front page. Millay was by then so sick with intestinal problems that she went straight from her wedding to the hospital, where she underwent surgery. The papers covered this, too: “honeymooning alone in hospital,” “poetess bride to go under the knife.”
Aging, then, presented Millay with a challenge: How could she write about wild passion, or tortured love affairs, when she was living a middle-aged woman’s low-key life? Her marriage to Boissevain was open, as were the marriages of many of their friends, but, from her diaries, it appears that Millay loved spending time with him at a farm they owned near Austerlitz, New York. “Beautiful sunny day,” one entry from June, 1927, begins, shortly after they purchased the property. “This morning at eight under the willows in the pasture Dolly gave birth to a beautiful calf.” “Nice cozy rainy day,” another from the same summer opens. “Ugin [Boissevain] & I sat by the open fire & Ugin read me from Upton Sinclair’s Oil!” The pleasure lasted: nearly seven years later, she described “the crab-apple tree by the front door . . . in full blossom,” which seemed “the prettiest thing in the world.”
Millay was never able to translate her contentment into compelling poetry. Much of the verse in “The Buck in the Snow and Other Poems,” a collection from 1928, seems inspired by her life on the farm, but it largely falls flat. Anxious to maintain her reputation, Millay tried writing deeply felt but propagandistic political poems, some of which were collected in “Make Bright the Arrows” (1940). These met with critical disapproval. Millay had to produce: Boissevain, who had liquidated his business in 1924, didn’t have a steady income, and Millay’s family, particularly her youngest sister, Kathleen, needed financial support. She continued to write and to give reading tours, during which she alternated recent poems and verses she’d composed decades earlier, as if to remind audiences of the “poet-girl” they had loved.
Millay’s fears of aging infuse “Fatal Interview,” her book about Dillon, which she composed throughout her thirties. In contrast to her earlier love sonnets, which are filled with images of flowering and growth, the dominant metaphors of these sonnets are death, decay, and disease. Leeches are administered, doctors called. There are jailers and dungeons and “a casket cool with pearls.” Millay’s speaker is a predator, ravishing the love object, or “a dense and sanguine ghost,” returned to “haunt the scene where I was happiest.” There’s something vampiric about the love affair represented here, as if the speaker—and perhaps Millay herself—were sucking the life out of the beloved and using it to fuel creativity.
By the mid-thirties, the intensity of Millay’s affair with Dillon was waning, and she was forced to reckon with the loss of her youth. Her diaries show her both resisting and succumbing to her fate. She became addicted to morphine, first prescribed to help with lingering nerve pain from a car accident; by the early forties, she was taking as much as two hundred and twenty milligrams in a day, far more than the standard hospital dose, along with codeine, pentobarbital, and alcohol. She recorded each morphine injection in her diaries; she might have her first dose at 5:30 a.m. and her last after midnight. Boissevain, in a strange show of devotion, began injecting himself with morphine, too, though never in such quantities. Ashamed of her addictions and of her descent into middle age, Millay used her diaries to scold herself. “Let Ugin find you outdoors, instead of Still in Bed, or in your SPECIAL CHAIR (Pah!—Old Woman!) in the drawing room,” she wrote. “Keep young, keep pretty for ugin.”
But Boissevain wasn’t her sole adoring fan; she had to keep pretty for the others, too. In his biography, Epstein writes that Millay “dreaded old age as only a woman who has been very beautiful can”; he intimates that she became increasingly dependent on drugs because she couldn’t cope with “the demise of her erotic power.” This isn’t exactly wrong, but it ignores the ways that Millay’s financial and professional fortunes were tied up with her youth and beauty. “At forty-seven years of age,” Epstein writes, “the image she saw in the mirror was disturbing”—not least, one imagines, because it would be scrutinized by reporters, photographers, and fans with long memories.
The end of Millay’s life was sad. She and Boissevain were in debt. Her reputation had crashed. Her drug use had sped up her aging: Wilson, who saw her more clearly than anyone, described her, at age fifty-six, as “heavy and dumpy,” with a “bird-lidded look” that reminded him of her mother. Still, she remained observant and curious. In her last diary entry, from May, 1949, she notes that the rabbits and deer grazing around the farm have gray fur, not brown, and resolves to ask her handyman about the animals’ “winter hair.”
Despite her many years as a cosmopolitan, Millay was at heart a country girl, a New Englander. It’s tempting to imagine what would have happened to her had she never left Maine. Perhaps she would have become a female Robert Frost: living in the country, writing poems out of passion, not for money, and finding success only later in life, after wisdom and experience had accrued. Or—and this seems more probable—she would have ended up like the woman in “Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree”: tired, disappointed, married to a man she doesn’t love, polishing the stove until she can see her face in it. For all her excesses and insecurities, her faults and bad decisions, there is still something admirable about Millay’s curiosity, her play in the klieg lights, her appetite for life. In 1912, Infinity and Eternity had beckoned, and the young Millay had followed. ♦
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