Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 – October 19, 1950) was an American lyrical poet and playwright and the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She was also known for her unconventional, bohemian lifestyle and her many love affairs. She used the pseudonym Nancy Boyd for her prose work.
Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, to Cora Lounella, a nurse, and Henry Tollman Millay, a schoolteacher who would later become superintendent of schools. Her middle name is derived from St. Vincent's Hospital in New York, where her uncle's life had been saved just prior to her birth.
In 1904, Cora officially divorced Millay's father for financial irresponsibility, but they had been separated for some years prior. Struggling financially, Cora and her three daughters, Edna (who would later insist on being called "Vincent"), Norma and Kathleen, moved from town to town, counting on the kindness of friends and relatives. Though poor, Cora never traveled without her trunk full of classic literature — including William Shakespeare, John Milton, and more — which she enthusiastically read to her children in her Irish brogue. Finally the family settled in Camden, Maine, moving into a small house on the property of Cora's well-heeled aunt. It was in this modest house in the middle of a field that Millay wrote the first of the poems that would catapult her to literary fame.
Cora taught her daughters to be independent and to speak their minds, which did not always sit well with the authority figures in Millay's life. Millay preferred to be called "Vincent" rather than Edna, which she found plain — her grade school principal, offended by her frank attitudes, refused to call her Vincent — instead, he called her by any woman's name that started with a V.
At Camden High School, Millay began nurturing her budding literary talents, starting at the school's literary magazine, The Megunticook, and eventually having some of her poetry published in the popular children's magazine St. Nicholas, the Camden Herald and, significantly, the anthology Current Literature, all by the age of 15.
Millay’s career and celebrity began in 1912 when she entered her poem “Renascence” into a poetry contest in The Lyric Year. The poem was so widely considered the best submission, that when it was ultimately placed fourth, it was quite the scandal for which Millay received much publicity. The first place winner, Orrick Johns, was among those who felt that “Renascence” was the best poem in the volume, and stated that “the award was as much an embarrassment to me as a triumph." One of the second prize winners even offered her his $250 prize money. In the immediate aftermath of The Lyric Year controversy, a wealthy woman named Caroline B. Dow heard Millay reciting her poetry and playing the piano and was so impressed that she offered to pay for Millay’s education at Vassar College.
Millay, was bisexual, and had several affairs while at Vassar, then a women's college. '”People fall in love with me," she noted, "and annoy me and distress me and flatter me and excite me.'' She went to Paris in 1921, where she met sculptor Thelma Wood, with whom she carried on an affair as well.
After graduating from Vassar in 1917, she moved to New York and settled in Greenwich Village Here she met and associated with many of the prominent artists, writers and political radicals who made up ‘Bohemia on the Hudson’, including the poet Wallace Stevens, the playwright Eugene O'Neil, and the left-wing journalist John Reed. Among her many lovers were the novelist Floyd Dell, the critic Edmund Wilson, (who proposed marriage unsuccessfully) John Peale Bishop, who was editor of Vanity Fair, and the poet Arthur Davison Ficke. Edmund Wilson would later portrayed her as the heroine of his novel, I Thought of Daisy (1929).
It was during her time in Greenwich Village that she first attained great popularity in America. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, for The Harp-Weaver, and Other Poems. She was the first woman to be so honored for poetry. She played central roles in productions of the Provincetown Players, and wrote for the company Aria da Capo (1920), a pacifist verse play as well. Millay traveled in Europe on assignment for Vanity Fair from 1921 to 1923, and her articles were later published in book form as Distressing Dialogues (1924).
In 1923, she married Eugen Jan Boissevain, then the 43-year-old widower of labor lawyer and war correspondent Inez Milholland. Boissevain gave up his successful coffee importing business, and devoted his full attention to Edna. They lived near Austerlitz, New York, at a farmhouse they named Steepletop.
In 1927 Millay joined protesters who were convinced that the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, accused of armed robbery and murder, were victims of miscarriage of justice. They were executed in August; Millay was arrested in Boston during a protest against their death sentence.
Millay wrote the libretto for Deems Taylor's opera, The King's Henchman, which proved a huge success at the Metropolitan Opera in 1927. She was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1929. From the beginning of her career, Millay had made reading tours, but in the early 1930s she began to broadcast her seductive contralto reading of her poems over the radio.
Millay's marriage with Boissevain was an open one, with both taking other lovers. Millay's most significant other relationship during this time was with the poet George Dillon, fourteen years her junior, for whom a number of her sonnets were written. Millay also collaborated with Dillon on Flowers of Evil, a translation of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal.
In 1940, Millay was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In ’43, she was awarded the gold medal of the Poetry Society of America.
Her reputation was damaged by poetry she wrote in support of the Allied war effort during World War II. Merle Rubin noted: "She seems to have caught more flak from the literary critics for supporting democracy than Ezra Pound did for championing fascism."
Her final years were dark and sad, dominated by struggles with alcoholism and drug addiction. She had a nervous breakdown in 1944. The Bohemian life of her youth was long gone, and she took no joy in her poems. Her husband tried to help her, taking her to rehabilitation centers, but without success. When he died of lung cancer in 1949, Millay took it hard. She died alone at home, on October 19, 1950 - falling down the stairs and breaking her neck. Millay's sister Norma edited a posthumously published collection of her poems, Mine the Harvest (1954).

THE DEATH OF AUTUMN

WHEN reeds are dead and a straw to thatch the marshes,
And feathered pampas-grass rides into the wind
Like agèd warriors westward, tragic, thinned
Of half their tribe, and over the flattened rushes,
Stripped of its secret, open, stark and bleak,
Blackens afar the half-forgotten creek,–
Then leans on me the weight of the year, and crushes
My heart. I know that Beauty must ail and die,
And will be born again,–but ah, to see
Beauty stiffened, staring up at the sky!
Oh, Autumn ! Autumn !–What is the Spring to me?

Dirge without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.
The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
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