Edna St. Vincent Millay
- LAST REVIEWED: 28 June 2016
- LAST MODIFIED: 28 June 2016
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0106
- LAST REVIEWED: 28 June 2016
- LAST MODIFIED: 28 June 2016
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0106
Introduction
Edna St. Vincent Millay (b. 1892–d. 1950) was among the most celebrated poets and accomplished sonnet writers of the 20th century. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and in 1943 she became the sixth person and second woman to be awarded the Frost Medal for her lifetime contribution to American poetry. At the height of her critical acclaim, the New York Times proclaimed her one of the “ten greatest living women” and the “chief glory of American literature” (1931). Yet her reputation underwent a steep decline during her lifetime. High modernist poetry, with its impersonality, allusiveness, and elitism, came to dominate academic taste in midcentury America. Combined with her enormous popularity and public engagement in social causes, Millay’s adoption of the European lyric form, known since the Renaissance for its highly polished structure, musicality, and intense expressivity, made her a critical target of the ascendant New Critics. Beginning in the 1970s, however, feminist reappraisals rekindled critical interest in Millay’s use of the sonnet to subvert the genre’s traditional associations with masculine poetic authority. Born on 22 February 1892 in Rockland, Maine, Millay was given her distinctive middle name as a tribute to the New York hospital that had saved her uncle’s life. Her divorced mother raised Millay and her two younger sisters to pursue their literary, musical, and theatrical ambitions. Millay was a literary prodigy, attaining national attention at the age of nineteen when she entered her poem Renascence in a prize competition that led to its publication in The Lyric Year (1912). Her public reading of the poem attracted the support of a wealthy patron who paid for her education at Vassar College. She graduated the same year that her first book of poems was published (1917), but only after the Vassar president saw fit to overturn her latest suspension. Her years living amid the pageantry of Greenwich Village during its radical heyday were her most productive. To this day, she remains best known for giving lyric and physical expression to the New Woman emerging in the aftermath of the Great War—unconventional, shimmering with Jazz Age energies, sexually sophisticated, and knowingly cynical in matters of love. Settling into an open marriage with the 43-year-old Dutch coffee importer Eugen Boissevain in 1923, she repaired to Steepletop, a seven-hundred-acre farm the couple bought in Austerlitz, New York, which is now a repository of Millay materials and the site of the Millay Colony for the Arts. In 1936, a freakish car accident left her in severe pain and sent her spiraling into alcoholism and drug addiction. After a yearlong battle with alcohol following her husband’s death in 1949, Millay died of a heart attack in 1950 at the age of 58.
General Overviews
By the time of Millay’s death in 1950, the collective wisdom of the academic establishment had consigned the poet, along with many of her female contemporaries, to the margins of literary history. In the decades that followed, Millay’s literary accomplishments were rarely mentioned without reference to her personal life and the theatricality of her public persona. Critical opinion regarding Millay began to turn following the publication of Brittin 1982, which updated the author’s original 1967 full-length study of Millay and represented the first multidimensional portrait of the poet as humanist, radical, and feminist. The years 1993–2011, beginning with preparations for the centenary of the poet’s birth and culminating with the 2011 publication of a new edition of the Collected Poems, produced a major reevaluation of Millay’s place in modern American poetry. Scholars gained access for the first time to unpublished Millay materials long held in private hands, which were used to great effect in Milford 2001 and Epstein 2001, two major biographies of the poet that appeared in the same year (see also Biographies and Personal Reminiscences). Milford’s volume is a prodigious accomplishment, with a level of detail that may overwhelm the casual reader, while Epstein’s lively account may provide a more accessible gateway into Millay’s poetics as illuminated by the life. Undergraduates, in particular, are encouraged to view two highly engaging documentaries from the Films on Demand educational video collection, Burning Candles: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Duncan 2011) and Greenwich Village Writers: The Bohemian Legacy (2012), which capture the contemporary excitement surrounding Millay and her artistic circle. Finally, those readers with a wider interest in gender and the reception accorded American women poets in the 20th century will learn much from Dickie and Travisano 1996 and Cucinella 2010, two fine general studies in which Millay figures prominently (see also Criticism).
Brittin, Norman A. Edna St. Vincent Millay. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1982.
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This is still one of the best introductions to Millay for undergraduates. It includes an explication of Millay’s work, a brief biography, a chronology of the life and work, complete notes and references, a selected annotated bibliography, and (in the 1982 update) a chapter on modernism, feminism, and Millay.
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Cucinella, Catherine. Poetics of the Body: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Marilyn Chin, and Marilyn Hacker. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
DOI: 10.1057/9780230106512Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Following in the footsteps of critics Cheryl Walker, Suzanne Clark, and Sandra Gilbert, Cucinella emphasizes “the indeterminable nature of [Millay’s] bodily performance and the body of her poetry” (p. 41).
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Dickie, Margaret, and Thomas Travisano, eds. Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.
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This readily available collection includes an especially lucid introduction by the editors and important chapters from critics Suzanne Clark and Cheryl Walker that introduce readers to “the trajectory of Millay’s reception” amid changing “literary fashions” (p. 172).
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Duncan, Robert A., dir. Burning Candles: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. DVD. New York: Films Media Group, 2011.
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This 90-minute documentary’s chronological account of Millay’s life and work is broken down into short 3–5 minute chapters (“Scandalous Poetry,” “Millay’s Mother,” “Millay Expelled from Vassar,” etc.) for easy online viewing. Available online from Films on Demand via libraries and subscription. Transcripts of each segment and related video resources are also provided.
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Epstein, Daniel Mark. What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St Vincent Millay. New York: Holt, 2001.
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Largely eclipsed by Nancy Milford’s tour de force, Epstein’s book is notable for being more selective and, as the work of a poet in his own right, more perceptive than Milford’s volume on the topic of Millay’s craft.
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Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St Vincent Millay. New York: Random House, 2001.
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Exhaustive and dense, the book represents the culmination of the author’s thirty-year effort to gain access from Millay’s sister to a treasure trove of the poet’s letters, drafts, and unknown poems and weave the material into a definitive biography of the poet’s personality.
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Rock, Marcia, dir. Greenwich Village Writers: The Bohemian Legacy. DVD. New York: Films Media Group, 2012.
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The New York City neighborhood surrounding Washington Square was a low-rent home for successive generations of immigrants and radical artists. In this account of the Village, Millay and Edmund Wilson arrive on the scene just as the sun was beginning to set on the golden years of bohemianism (1912–1916). Available via libraries and subscription from the Films Media Group.
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Biographies and Personal Reminiscences
Two personal reminiscences by ardent Millay admirers provide unmatched firsthand accounts of the poet in her youth and middle age. New York literary lion and Vanity Fair editor Edmund Wilson captures the dazzling young Millay, who appears throughout the pages of his notebooks and diaries from the twenties (Wilson 1975). Sheean 1951 offers a sympathetic portrait of the married Millay in middle age. Gould 1969 reflects a new latitude afforded biographers in the late sixties and early seventies to explore the psychosexual origins of a poet’s artistic choices. However, these earlier studies of the poet’s life were largely eclipsed in 2001, with the appearance of two authoritative biographies of Millay. Milford 2001 is an indispensable work of scholarship and likely to remain a fixture of Millay studies for years to come. Epstein 2001, while the slimmer of the two volumes, is perhaps the livelier narrative, offering important insights into the poet’s craft. Finally, the recent documentary film Burning Candles: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Duncan 2011) is a highly recommended career-spanning chronicle that makes effective use of the latest scholarship and archival materials to situate Millay’s art within her life and times.
Duncan, Robert A., dir. Burning Candles: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. DVD New York: Films Media Group, 2011.
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Viewers are introduced to the full arc of Millay’s life and career through short 3–5 minute video chapters (“Scandalous Poetry,” “Millay’s Mother,” “Millay Expelled from Vassar,” etc.) in this involving 90-minute documentary available online from Films on Demand via libraries and subscription. Transcripts of each segment and related video resources are also provided.
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Epstein, Daniel Mark. What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St Vincent Millay. New York: Holt, 2001.
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Largely eclipsed by Milford’s tour de force, Epstein’s book is notable for being more selective and, as the work of a poet in his own right, more perceptive than Milford’s volume on the topic of Millay’s craft.
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Gould, Jean. The Poet and Her Book: A Biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1969.
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This novelistic account of Millay’s life is notable for introducing Millay’s sexuality (limited here to her heterosexuality) as an interpretative framework for her art, and for reproducing photographs clearly showing the role physical beauty played in Millay’s public persona.
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Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St Vincent Millay. New York: Random House, 2001.
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This is likely to remain the definitive biography for many years to come owing to its comprehensiveness, subtlety, and the biographer’s dogged determination to win the favor of Millay’s estate, enabling scholarly access to a wealth of previously unpublished materials.
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Sheean, Vincent. The Indigo Bunting: A Memoir of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Harper, 1951.
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Sheean and his wife befriended Millay and her husband Eugen in 1945. The memoir offers a sympathetic and perceptive portrait of a middle-aged Millay at home in Steepletop and summering at Ragged Island off the coast of Maine.
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Wilson, Edmund. The Twenties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period. Edited by Leon Edel. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975.
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Throughout the pages of these notebooks and diaries from the period, an admiring Wilson captures his impressions of the young Millay caught in the whirl of wild parties and literary infighting that was Greenwich Village in the twenties.
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Reference Works
Millay criticism published before 1980 is not especially insightful on the issues of gender, genre, modernism, and sound that dominate current discussions of Millay and her legacy. However, literary historians will find a valuable resource in Yost 1968 (first published 1937), an annotated bibliography to Millay criticism published from 1918 through 1936. Nierman 1977 provides succinct descriptions of all criticism published from 1918 through 1976. Nierman and Patton 1996, an online supplement to Nierman 1977, brings Nierman’s annotated list of criticism up to date through 1993. Brief guides to Millay are available on the websites of the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society and of Vassar College, Millay’s alma mater (see Peraza-Baker and Johnson 2012). Finally, The Poetry Foundation website offers an excellent introduction to Millay’s life and a list of important resources for the budding Millay scholar.
Edna St. Vincent Millay Society at Steepletop.
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Providing a brief biographical sketch, a short list of introductions to Millay’s life and work, and recordings of Millay poetry readings, this website is the main resource for people planning a visit to Millay’s farmhouse and gravesite or interested in joining and donating to The Millay Society.
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Nierman, Judith. Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Reference Guide. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1977.
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Literary historians will be most interested in this reference work, comprising a comprehensive index along with Nierman’s descriptive entries for approximately 1,000 books, articles, reviews, and dissertations about Millay published from 1918 through 1973.
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Nierman, Judith, and John P. Patton, comps. “An Annotated Bibliography of Works about Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1974–1993, with Supplement (1912–1973).” In Women’s Studies Database. College Park, MD: University of Maryland Women’s Studies, 1996.
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Millay bibliographers Nierman and Patton use this website to update Nierman 1977, adding supplemental references missing from that volume as well as new criticism from 1976 through 1993.
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Peraza-Baker, Maya, and Colton Johnson. “Edna St. Vincent Millay.” In Vassar Encyclopedia. Edited by the Vassar Historian. Poughkeepsie, NY: Vassar College, 2012.
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The article on Millay in her alma mater’s alumni encyclopedia is primarily of interest for the connection it draws between Millay and her husband’s first wife, Inez Milholland, a fellow Vassar graduate and renowned suffragette who died at the age of thirty.
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Poetry Foundation. “Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892–1950.” Poetry Foundation.
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Provides a complete bibliography of Millay’s primary texts and includes a useful list of periodicals in which they first appeared. The website is valuable for its shrewd and succinct overview of the poet’s life and career, but without explanatory notes, the list of “further readings” is less helpful.
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Yost, Karl. A Bibliography of the Works of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Franklin, 1968.
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First published in 1937, Yost’s bibliography lists and describes the publishing histories of all works by and about Millay that appeared between 1912 and 1936.
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Manuscripts and Papers
Scholars focused on Millay’s early life and career should first consult the Edna St. Vincent Millay Papers, a collection of diaries, notebooks, letters and other documents held by the New York Public Library. For those interested in Millay’s personal relationships and their impact on her literary and political activities, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Papers, 1832–1992, held by the United States Library of Congress, represents the largest and most comprehensive collection of Millay letters and personal paraphernalia. Yale University’s Edmund Wilson Papers, housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, is a strong source of information on the literary circle that surrounded Millay during her years in Greenwich Village. The collection contains several photographs of Millay and materials related to the artistic peers, friends, and lovers with whom Millay corresponded. Finally, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Collection, 1900–1992, housed within the University of New England’s Maine Women Writers Collection in Portland, Maine, emphasizes Millay’s ties to the region and includes photocopied poems, dust jackets, and promotional materials, along with letters from Millay to her mother Cora and works by Millay’s sister Norma. All collections are open to researchers contingent on receiving permission from the respective curators.
Edmund Wilson Papers. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
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Among the papers of literary critic and Vanity Fair editor Edmund Wilson, readers will find correspondence with many of the acquaintances Wilson shared with Millay, including the actress and author Mary Kennedy, poet and playwright Arthur Davison Ficke, publisher John Chipman Farrar, novelist Alyse Gregory, and artist Georgia O’Keefe.
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Edna St. Vincent Millay Collection, 1900–1992. Maine Women Writers Collection, University of New England.
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The MWWC’s Millay collection contains photocopies of Millay’s early work, advertisements for her publications, 1923 Pulitzer Prize letters, letters from Millay to her mother, and two volumes of Tamarack, a journal edited by her sister Norma Millay in the 1980s, among other items.
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Edna St. Vincent Millay Papers. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.
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The New York Public Library’s comprehensive holdings (dating from 1909 to 1974) feature the poet’s diaries for the years 1911 to 1917, notebooks from 1909 to 1912 and 1935, portraits of the author, and correspondence, including letters about the poet written by Robert Penn Warren and Edmund Wilson, among others.
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Edna St. Vincent Millay Papers, 1832–1992 (bulk 1900–1950). US Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
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Millay scholars looking for the sources of Millay’s literary ambitions, love of experimental theater, and political activism should consult this massive collection of 45,000 items, including diaries, scrapbooks, playbills, and letters to her mother Cora, her sister Norma, her husband Eugen Boissevain, and his first wife, Inez Milholland.
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Primary Texts
Millay published nine volumes of poetry in her lifetime: Renascence: And Other Poems (1917); Second April (1921); A Few Figs from Thistles: Poems and Four Sonnets (1920); The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (1922); The Buck in the Snow, and Other Poems (1928); Fatal Interview (1931); Wine from These Grapes (1934); Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939); and Make Bright the Arrows (1940). A tenth book of poems called Mine the Harvest (1954) was compiled by Millay’s sister Norma and published four years after the poet’s death. There is no authoritative edition of the complete poetry, prose, and drama of Edna St. Vincent Millay. However, Millay’s poetry and her most important verse dramas are available to modern readers in a number of recent editions. Her major writings may be grouped under two subheadings: Poetry and Drama.
Poetry
Generations of readers have been introduced to Millay’s works through Norma Millay’s familiar edition, Collected Poems: Edna St. Vincent Millay (Millay 2011). Originally published in 1956, this gathering of poems, personal letters, and photographs has never gone out of print. In 2011, Collected Poems was reissued with a new, informative essay by Millay scholar Holly Peppe. A number of other collections are also worthy of consideration. Millay 1991, Millay 1998, Millay 2001, and Millay 2003 are all notable for their annotations and their editors’ lucid introductions. Finally, first editions of Millay’s major work have been digitized, collected, and made available online at the HathiTrust Digital Library website, an important and accessible resource for the student and scholar.
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For free and easy access to full-text digitized versions of all first editions, including out-of-print volumes, students are advised to visit the HathiTrust Digital Library and search this comprehensive online collection using the keywords “Edna St. Vincent Millay.”
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Millay, Edna St. Vincent. Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems. Edited by Colin Falck. London: Carcanet, 1991.
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This centenary edition of selected poems is notable for the perceptive editor’s introduction by poet and critic Falck. Even Millay’s admirers, Falck notes, tended to reinforce her reputation for being an intellectual lightweight by praising her whimsy and ignoring her innovative ironies.
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Millay, Edna St. Vincent. Edna St. Vincent Millay: Early Poems. Edited by Holly Peppe. New York: Penguin, 1998.
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Millay’s literary executor and President of the Millay Society since 1987 is the force behind this relatively recent edition of the early poems.
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Millay, Edna St. Vincent. The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Edited by Nancy Milford. New York: Modern Library, 2001.
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A detailed introduction by Millay’s definitive biographer is the chief attraction of Milford’s edition of the selected poetry, which was timed to appear in conjunction with the Milford’s biography of the poet.
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Millay, Edna St. Vincent. Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems. Edited by J. D. McClatchy. New York: Library of America, 2003.
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Along with McClatchy’s reliably astute introduction, this grouping of the poet’s familiar poems also features the rarely republished Aria da Capo and excerpts from her libretto for the opera The King’s Henchman.
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Millay, Edna St. Vincent. Collected Poems: Edna St. Vincent Millay. Edited by Norma Millay. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2011.
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This new edition of the 1956 Collected Poems adds Holly Peppe’s astute introduction to Millay’s life and an index of titles and first lines while preserving Norma Millay’s original arrangement of the poems, photographs from the Millay Society archives, and a selection of Millay’s personal letters to family and friends.
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Drama
Millay is hardly mentioned today without reference to the theatricality of her poetry and public performances, which were said by Edmund Wilson to have had an “intoxicating effect on people.” From 1917 through 1919, Millay was an actress, writer, and director with the Provincetown Players, debuting her first one-act plays in the company’s rented Greenwich Village space. Scholars interested in Millay as a dramatist usually focus on her early verse dramas, including Aria da Capo (Millay 2000, first staged in 1919, and published in 1921); the Lamp and the Bell: A Drama in Five Acts (Millay 2010), written to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of her alma mater Vassar College, and The King’s Henchman (Millay 1927), her only opera libretto. Samuel French Publishing offers acting editions of Aria da Capo and The Murder of Lidice (Millay 1972), a late “verse drama” written in the context of the poet’s campaign to end American isolationism at the start of the Second World War. Meanwhile, first editions of Aria da Capo (Millay 2009) and The Lamp and the Bell (Millay 2010) have been digitized and are freely available online through Project Gutenberg.
Millay, Edna St. Vincent. The King’s Henchman: A Play in Three Acts. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1927.
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Millay’s opera The King’s Henchman (music by Deems Taylor) was staged at the Metropolitan Opera to ecstatic reviews in 1927, and the published libretto ran through fifteen printings in that year alone. Modern readers can find excerpts from this out-of-print work in Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems (Millay 2003, cited under Poetry).
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Millay, Edna St. Vincent. The Murder of Lidice. Adapted and arranged by Lois O. Meyer. New York and London: Samuel French, 1972.
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Written at the request of the Writers’ War Board, performed on the National Broadcast Company radio network, and originally published in 1942, this dramatic poem was meant to be a broadly accessible retelling of a recent wartime atrocity, the Nazi extermination of villagers in Lidice, Czechoslovakia.
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Millay, Edna St. Vincent. Aria da Capo. New York and London: Samuel French, 2000.
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This one-act antiwar play mixes a commedia dell’ arte structure and farcical tone with pointed cultural critique. In 1919 the Provincetown Players chose to produce it over William Carlos Williams’s The Apple Tree. Echoes of Aria da Capo have been heard in Williams’s long poem Paterson.
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Millay, Edna St. Vincent. Aria da Capo. Project Gutenberg, 2009.
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Easily accessible on the Project Gutenberg website, this digitized version of the play’s first edition will serve the purposes of the casual reader and the literary historian alike.
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Millay, Edna St. Vincent. The Lamp and the Bell: A Drama in Five Acts. Project Gutenberg, 2010.
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This drama centers on two stepsisters, the “burning lamp” and the “silver bell” of the title, whose filial devotion brooks no rivals. The central relationship has inspired some critics to see covert lesbianism in this medieval tragedy.
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Recordings
Millay’s radio broadcasts and studio recordings give modern listeners an opportunity to hear the voice that enthralled thousands of listeners in the thirties and forties. Wheeler 2008 provides a fascinating account of the national radio networks, and the exciting new medium they provided for the performance of poetry. Wheeler emphasizes the distinction between live radio broadcasts, which the theatrical Millay used to her considerable advantage, and in-studio recording, which Millay and many other poets of the period found more difficult to master. Millay’s declamatory style of recitation enchanted the audiences of her day but tends to confound the modern listener. For those interested in the impact this vocal style may have had on contemporary audiences, Furr 2010 offers the best introduction to “the beautiful throat aesthetic” that characterized the public performances of Millay and the other women poets of the era.
Furr, Derek. Recorded Poetry and Poetic Reception from Edna Millay to the Circle of Robert Lowell. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
DOI: 10.1057/9780230109919Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This singular book helps modern listeners appreciate the early-20th-century declamatory style of poetry reading, known as the “beautiful throat aesthetic” (p. 84). Furr compares the quality of Millay’s recorded voice with that of younger women poets in the modernist audio archive, particularly Elizabeth Bishop and Anne Sexton.
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Millay, Edna St. Vincent. Edna St. Vincent Millay Reading from Her Poetry. New York: Caedmon, 1964.
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This vinyl-format recording available from online booksellers and in university libraries includes readings of twenty-two lyrics, including Renascence; Recuerdo; I Shall Forget You Presently, My Dear; The Anguish; I Must Not Die of Pity; To the Maid of Orleans; Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies, and The Ballad of the Harp Weaver.
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Wheeler, Lesley. “Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Performance of Presence.” In Voicing American Poetry: Sound Performance from the 1920s to the Present. By Lesley Wheeler, 39–59. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.
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Wheeler’s comprehensive essay explains how Millay, one of the most famous and successful poet-performers during the 1920s and 1930s, took advantage of the new national radio networks to create a powerful illusion of presence and intimacy in her radio broadcasts.
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Correspondence
MacDougall 1972 (originally published 1952) is the only edited collection of Millay’s correspondence published to date. Arranged chronologically, the volume begins with the poet’s youth in Maine and provides an unparalleled view into Millay’s sense of humor, her insight, and her development as a writer, family member, and public figure. Millay 2011 benefits from a postscript section that includes a set of Millay’s personal letters to family and friends.
MacDougall, Allan R., ed. Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972.
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MacDougall’s compendium of Millay’s letters is heavily edited, but lightly annotated. While undergraduates may be mystified by the names dropped in this volume, they are likely to enjoy the humor and approachability of Millay’s letters nonetheless.
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Millay, Edna St. Vincent. Collected Poems: Edna St. Vincent Millay. Edited by Norma Millay. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2011.
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Norma Millay included a small selection of her sister’s letters to family and friends in Collected Poems 2011, originally published in 1956 (see also Collections).
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Criticism
The three excellent collections of critical essays published between 1993 and 1996 represent the widest range of critical perspectives on Millay’s poetry and prose available to readers today. These three books are described in detail under the subheading Collections. Individual essays from these collections, along with later essays published in other venues, are listed and described under the three remaining subheadings in this section devoted to Millay criticism. Essays that are grouped under the subheading Millay and Modernism consider the fate of modern poets like Millay whose aesthetic and political choices do not conform to the strictures of high modernism. Essays that reevaluate Millay’s poetic performances from a primarily feminist perspective fall under the subheading Millay and Gender. Finally, all essays described under the subheading Millay and Genre are unified by their interest in Millay’s subversive embrace of inherited literary forms.
Collections
The last decade of the 20th century saw a surge of interest in Millay’s work, resulting in two important collections of critical essays focused entirely on Millay (Thesing 1993 and Freedman 1995) and one collection (Dickie and Travisano 1996) on women writers of the modernist era in which Millay figures prominently. Thesing 1993 traces the fluctuations in Millay’s critical reception and reputation across the 20th century and is an excellent resource for literary historians. Riding a wave of renewed interest in the poet that culminated in a three-day conference celebrating the 100th anniversary of the poet’s birth, Freedman 1995 is a foundational essay collection for current Millay studies. Both Freedman 1995 and Dickie and Travisano 1996 place Millay within the context of a much broader feminist critique of male modernism and its disdain for the “womanly” expression Millay practiced in her art and embodied in her person.
Dickie, Margaret, and Thomas Travisano, eds. Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.
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This readily available collection includes an especially valuable introduction by the editors and important chapters from critics Suzanne Clark and Cheryl Walker that introduce readers to “the trajectory of Millay’s reception” amid changing “literary fashions” (p. 172).
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Freedman, Diane P., ed. Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995.
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In addition to its clear editor’s introduction and valuable bibliography, this article offers the most complex critical portrait of Millay to date. The essays compiled in this volume view Millay’s work and critical reception through a feminist lens, examining the gendered politics of poetic authority and authenticity that prevailed during the 20th century.
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Thesing, William B., ed. Critical Essays on Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: G.K. Hall, 1993.
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Thesing provides a short biographical introduction to Millay, excerpts from Millay’s verse dramas and satirical sketches, contemporary reviews by critics and fellow poets, and a grouping of feminist critical essays commissioned specifically for this volume, along with a useful bibliography and index.
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Millay and Modernism
When Millay embraced traditional poetic forms, sentimental subject matter, and progressive politics, she stood in opposition to the poetic experimentation, impersonality, and elitism espoused by Eliot and Pound and favored by the academy in mid-20th-century America. Bradshaw 2014 provides a good introduction to the qualities in Millay’s life and work that led to her dismissal by the literary establishment of her day. Reevaluations of Millay’s reputation are part of a much broader debate over the American literary canon, particularly its elevation of the modernist experiment to sanctified status. For Allen 1993, “popular modernists” such as Frost and Millay were every bit as avant-garde and insurgent as Eliot and Pound; they simply wrote in a language that people could understand. For Kaiser 1995, Clark 1993, Clark 1995, and Clark 1996, Millay’s sentimental discourse was the antithesis of a masculine modernism and represented an alternative feminine tradition that the modernist literary establishment worked hard to repress. Walker 1996 complicates Millay’s relation to modernism even further by arguing that Millay is modernist, antimodernist, and postmodernist, all at the same time. Finally, Michailidou 2003 reminds us that Millay flouted modernist orthodoxies with her overtly political poetry. Disparaged by contemporary American critics as mere agitprop, Millay’s activist poetry was received quite differently by European readers on the verge of war and went on to inspire a later generation of women poets such as Muriel Rukeyser and Adrienne Rich for whom the personal and the political were inseparable.
Allen, Gilbert. “Millay and Modernism.” In Critical Essays on Edna St. Vincent Millay. Edited by William B. Thesing, 266–272. New York: G.K. Hall, 1993.
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For Allen, the only distinction between what the author calls the “Popular Modernists” like Millay and Robert Frost and the “High Modernists” like James Joyce and Ezra Pound is that the former deliberately wrote for a public in a language all could understand, while the latter expressed their insurgency using avant-garde forms.
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Bradshaw, Melissa. “Edna St. Vincent Millay.” In A Companion to Modernist Poetry. Edited by D. E. Chinitz and G. McDonald, 474–483. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2014.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118604427.ch39Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Focusing on Renascence and Other Poems and The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver, the author provides a good overview of Millay’s early work, arguing that the qualities drawing popular audiences to Millay in her heyday were precisely the ones that repelled the influential New Critics in the 1930s and 1940s.
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Clark, Suzanne. “The Unwarranted Discourse, Sentimental Community, Modernist Women, and the Case of Millay.” In Critical Essays on Edna St. Vincent Millay. Edited by William B. Thesing, 248–265. New York: G.K. Hall, 1993.
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For Clark, Millay’s case exemplifies the “cruel paradox” of being a woman poet at a time when becoming vastly popular with a female readership could disqualify a writer from serious consideration by the literary establishment.
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Clark, Suzanne. “Uncanny Millay.” In Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal. Edited by Diane P. Freedman, 3–26. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995.
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For Clark, Millay is the symptom of the disorder at the heart of the modernist project. The repressed woman writer returns to haunt literary studies as male modernism’s cultural unconscious.
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Clark, Suzanne. “Jouissance and the Sentimental Daughter: Edna St. Vincent Millay.” In Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers. Edited by Margaret Dickie and Thomas Travisano, 143–169. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.
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Originally published in 1986. This psychoanalytic reading of Millay’s “Renascence” lays the groundwork for Clark’s later treatments of the gender politics behind modernism’s rejection and repression of sentimental discourse.
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Kaiser, Jo Ellen Green. “Displaced Modernism: Millay and the Triumph of Sentimentality.” In Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal. Edited by Diane P. Freedman, 27–40. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995.
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For Kaiser, Millay consciously parted company in the 1920s with modernist poets, rejecting their “nihilism” and apparent lack of faith in the “general public’s ability to recognize and reform its world” (p. 39).
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Michailidou, Artemis. “Edna Millay, Muriel Rukeyser, and Adrienne Rich: Political Poetry, Social Protest, and the Place of the Woman Writer.” European Journal of American Culture 22.1 (2003): 7–22.
DOI: 10.1386/ejac.22.1.7/0Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Millay’s critique of American isolation and modern warfare received hostile criticism at home, but as Michailidou reminds us, European readers greeted Millay’s political poetry with high praise, while Millay’s example would go on to inspire in Rukeyser and Rich a strong belief in the power of poetry to influence public opinion.
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Walker, Cheryl. “Antimodern, Modern, and Postmodern Millay: Contexts of Revaluation.” In Gendered Modernisms: American women poets and their readers. Edited by Margaret Dickie and Thomas Travisano, 170–190. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.
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Walker sees Millay “poised to resume a position in the canon she was forced to vacate in the thirties and forties” (p. 170), but cautions that it is more accurate to speak of “three different Millays—antimodernist, modernist, and postmodernist” (p. 172).
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Millay and Gender
The matter of Millay’s gender and its larger meaning became a fixture of Millay criticism from the moment her first work was published. For her earliest women readers, Millay was an avatar of the New Woman challenging social conventions, as is evident in a 1924 review by Poetry magazine founder and editor Harriet Monroe (reprinted in Thesing 1993, cited under Collections), which compares Millay favorably with Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Emily Dickinson. Yet if the reading public saw Millay as the greatest woman writer since Sappho, the academic establishment dismissed her life and work in equally gendered terms, as can be seen in Ciardi 1993), an essay by the poet John Ciardi written in 1950, the year of Millay’s death. Representing one of the first reconsiderations of Millay’ from the perspective of second wave feminism, Klemans 1993 (first published 1979) sees Millay as a feminist philosophy pioneer. Walker 1991 argues that the celebrated woman poet’s precarious position as a commodity in the literary marketplace explains Millay’s use of multiple poetic masks and impersonations. Walker’s highly influential work set the terms for many subsequent treatments of Millay’s bodily performances and body of poetry. For Walker, Millay is a woman whose art was shaped and determined by prevailing norms of femininity. By contrast, Cucinella 2010 finds Millay’s nature to be “indeterminable” and therefore free from all socially constructed notions of gender or embodiment.
Ciardi, John. “Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Figure of Passionate Living.” In Critical Essays on Edna St. Vincent Millay. Edited by William B. Thesing, 157–162. New York: G.K. Hall, 1993.
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Published in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1950, the year of Millay’s death, Ciardi’s commentary conveys a common midcentury response on the part of the academic establishment to the arc of Millay’s career. Ciardi’s Millay was a youthful “creator of her own legend” who lost her good looks, her audience, and the last vestige of her gift with her tragic fall into middle age.
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Cucinella, Catherine. Poetics of the Body: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Marilyn Chin, and Marilyn Hacker. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
DOI: 10.1057/9780230106512Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Cucinella follows Walker and Gilbert in examining Millay’s body as a commodity in the literary marketplace while arguing that interpretations of Millay’s performances can only be partial and provisional, given the “indeterminable” nature of Millay’s poses and poetry (p. 41).
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Gilbert, Sandra M. “Directions for Using the Empress.” In Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal. Edited by Diane P. Freedman, 163–181. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995.
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Gilbert applies her familiar feminist framework to account for Millay’s “female female impersonations” as a poet and performer, making particularly interesting use of the poet’s “Nancy Boyd” (Nancy Boy) alter ego in describing Millay’s struggle to “use the artifice of ‘femininity’ without being used by it” (p. 180).
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Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. “Female Female Impersonators: The Fictive Music of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Marianne Moore.” In No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 3, Letters from the Front. By, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 57–120. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
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In this chapter from their sweeping account of the modern woman writer, Gilbert and Gubar claim that both Millay and Moore wrote as beings impersonating “different sorts of ‘feminine’ personalities in order to investigate both ‘female’ costume and the concept of ‘the feminine’” (p. 73).
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Klemans, Patricia A. “‘Being Born a Woman’: A New Look at Edna St. Vincent Millay.” In Critical Essays on Edna St. Vincent Millay. Edited by William B. Thesing, 206–212. New York: G.K. Hall, 1993.
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Originally published in 1979, Klemens argues for a new look at Millay as feminist philosopher and pioneer whose poems reversed the “masculine-feminine traditional stances,” threatening the male reviewers and inspiring woman readers of her day.
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Monroe, Harriet. “Comment: Edna St. Vincent Millay.” In Critical Essays on Edna St. Vincent Millay. Edited by William B. Thesing, 133–136. New York: G.K. Hall, 1993.
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Monroe considered Millay the greatest woman poet since Sappho, an important indicator of what Millay’s early work might have meant to contemporary women readers.
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Walker, Cheryl. Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1991.
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Walker’s Millay is a “woman on the market” (pp. 135–164), both a willing accomplice and a victim in the economy of female celebrity. This major work is the first to complicate the story of the poet’s reception.
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Millay and Genre
Genre criticism has been a feature of Millay criticism from the start. Critics have often focused on Millay’s abiding relationship with the sonnet as the genre that first brought her fame, pointing to the ways in which the poet’s work reflected the influence of Sappho Catullus, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth. Millay’s appropriation and subversion of the sonnet and other poetic genres has been a constant refrain of Millay studies, although attitudes toward Millay’s use of genre have shifted through the years. In the late 1970s, for example, essays such as Perlmutter 1993 (first published 1977) and Stanbrough 1993 (first published 1979) expressed enormous ambivalence about Millay’s poetic formalism, which struck them as the poet’s effort to hide her authentic self and vulnerability behind a host of costumes and contrivances, in defiance of the sincerity thought to be essential to the lyric form. However, the next decade brought more sympathetic readings informed by a feminist critique of “authenticity” as a social construct. In fact, it was precisely the ways in which Millay’s sonnets subverted the genre’s traditional associations with male poetic authority which first attracted feminist critics to the poet’s work. Fried 1986 launches the discussion of gender, genre, and Millay that continues to this day by contrasting Millay’s sonnets with those of the Romantic male lyricists, particularly Wordsworth. Peppe 1995 concentrates on Millay’s response to the Renaissance sonnet form and its gendered tropes, seeing Millay’s amatory sonnet sequences as a challenge to the male romantic tradition of the beautiful but cruel mistress. By contrast, Johnson 1995 argues that Millay’s sonnets, far from owing everything to the Renaissance tradition, are in fact testaments to her modernist sense of time and transience. Zellinger 2012 insists that Millay’s performances cannot be understood outside of an older antebellum American poetess tradition. Wheeler 2014 provides a fine overview of Millay’s poetic formalism, drawing attention to the many political and aesthetic dimensions of her stylistic preference for inherited metrical patterns over modern experimental verse. Meanwhile, Millay’s adoption of other literary genres and roles preoccupies Woodard 1995 and Lombardi 1995. Woodard 1995 looks for traces of the poet in the potboilers Millay published under the literary pseudonym Nancy Boyd. Lombardi 1995 focuses attention on the necrophilia and brutality in Millay’s idea of poetic translation as described in the preface to her English-language version of Baudelaire’s Fleur du Mal.
Fried, Debra. “Andromeda Unbound: Gender and Genre in Millay’s Sonnets.” Twentieth Century Literature 31.1 (Spring 1986): 1–22.
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Winner of the 1986 TCL Prize in Literary Criticism. Notable for being the first essay to focus attention on Millay’s appropriation of the sonnet, with its “implied connections between the formal (generic, metrical, rhetorical) constraints and sexual ones” (p. 1).
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Johnson, Robert. “A Moment’s Monument: Millay’s Sonnet and Modern Time.” In Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal. Edited by Diane P. Freedman, 117–129. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995.
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Modernist notions of time and transience are more influential than Renaissance tropes in Millay’s construction of the modern sonnet.
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Lombardi, Marilyn M. “Vampirism and Translation: Millay, Baudelaire, and the Erotics of Poetic Transfusion.” In Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal. Edited by Diane P. Freedman, 130–141. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995.
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This unique study of Millay’s translator’s preface to Baudelaire’s Fleur du Mal explores the anxieties of influence and the limits of empathy evident in Millay’s vision of translation as a brutal act visited upon the corpus of a dead poet by the translator’s masterful and cruel imagination.
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Peppe, Holly. “Rewriting the Myth of the Woman in Love.” In Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal. Edited by Diane P. Freedman, 52–65. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995.
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By proclaiming herself a force of nature—“not Hell’s mistress but her own” (p. 62)—Millay’s poetic persona in Fatal Interview deconstructs the male romantic tradition in which the female object of desire is fickle and manipulative.
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Perlmutter, Elizabeth P. “A Doll’s Heart: The Girl in the Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Louise Bogan.” In Critical Essays on Edna St. Vincent Millay. Edited by William B. Thesing, 179–205. New York: G.K. Hall, 1993.
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Originally published in 1977. Takes Millay to task for defying the wholeness and sincerity required by the lyric form, likening Millay’s poetics to the cheap, deceptive dressing a prostitute uses to conceal her authentic self.
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Stanbrough, Jane. “Millay and the Language of Vulnerability.” In Critical Essays on Edna St. Vincent Millay. Edited by William B. Thesing, 213–228. New York: G.K. Hall, 1993.
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Originally published in 1979. Draws attention to the way the poet’s language and structural patterns contradict her self-assured public persona by revealing her overwhelming sense of vulnerability and victimization as a woman whose professional ambitions are restricted by social realities.
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Wheeler, Lesley. “The Formalist Modernism of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Helene Johnson, and Louise Bogan.” In The Cambridge History of American Poetry. Edited by Alfred Bendixen and Stephen Burt, 628–649. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
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Wheeler provides a succinct introduction to the political and aesthetic meanings attributed to a poet’s stylistic choices in the modernist era, with specific reference to those writers like Millay who did not conform to the modernist embrace of stylistic experimentalism over metrical patterns. Available from Cambridge Histories Online.
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Woodard, Deborah. “‘I Could Do a Woman Better Than That’: Masquerade in Millay’s Potboilers.” In Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal. Edited by Diane P. Freedman, 145–162. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995.
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Millay’s penchant for masquerade is explored in this interesting examination of the fiction she wrote for Vanity Fair and other popular urban periodicals under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd.
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Zellinger, Elissa. “Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Poetess Tradition.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 29.2 (December 2012): 240–262.
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Places Millay within the tradition of the antebellum American “poetess” tradition in an effort to resolve the apparent conflict between Millay’s formalism and her subversive ethos so troubling to critics such as Stanbrough 1993 and Johnson 1995.
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