Lindsay’s Scribblings

You can’t just forget

Love

And I loved you

I’ll never be over it

I’ll just want to be

I’ll never be over it

But I’ll never be over him

And that, my dear,

Is the sticking point.

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.” – Edna St. Vincent Millay

Born in 1892, in Rockland, Maine, to Cora (Lounella – Masterplots 1) Buzzelle Millay and Henry Tolman Millay, Edna was a precocious child, the first in a series of three daughters. Her father left, at her mother’s request, when she was seven because he couldn’t control his gambling habit. Cora was trained to be an opera singer, but after Henry left, moved the children to Cambden and became a district nurse to earn money for her family’s subsistence (Wheatley 7). Still, Cora never relinquished her artistic passion: she worked with local orchestras and helped them to develop scores (Gray 2). Additionally, Cora taught Edna, who styled herself “Vincent,” the art of meter at four and piano at seven (Gray 2), spending no less attention on her younger daughters, who avidly followed in Edna’s footsteps. Young Millay took advanced piano lessons at the age of twelve (Wheatley 7) and hoped to become a professional pianist, but her fingers while long, were not long enough. After being dissuaded by a local piano teacher, Edna began to focus her primary attentions on writing (Contemporary Authors Online 4).

From 1906 to 1910, her poems were published in the children’s Magazine, St. Nicholas (Contemporary Authors Online 4), starting with the poem “Forest Trees” at the age of fourteen (Quartermain 5). One poem even received a prize and was reprinted in the 1907 edition of Current Opinion (Contemporary Authors Online 4). Through her mother, and while her mother was at work, Millay became introduced to both classical and great contemporary authors and poets. When she entered school, she became the editor of the Camden High School Magazine (Quartermain 5).

Her first serious poem, “Renascence,” was published in the Lyric Year’s international competition, winning fourth place, when she was 19. Many expected it to win first, and its lower ranking was highly protested (Wheatley 8 ) and the poem still garnered great renown. It was written in tetrameter couplets (Quartermain 5). Kennerley republished the poem in Millay’s first book, Renascence, and Other Poems (Contemporary Authors Online 4).

At a combination poetry reading/piano recital, Millay caught the attention of Caroline B. Dow, who worked with the YWCA (Quartermain 5) and who helped her acquire a scholarship to Vassar College in 1913, after she spent a semester at Barnard (Wheatley 8).

Throughout college she published several poems in the Vassar Miscellany and wrote plays that she starred in, such as “The Princess Marries the Page” (Quartermain 5-6).

Then, seeking a career as an actress, she moved to Greenwich village, where she continued to thrive in bi-sexual promiscuity and live a generally bohemian, artsy life. She was a member of the “Provincetown Players” (Gray 3) and wrote, acted in and directed a one-act play for the Provincetown Playhouse, Aria da Capo, in 1919, as well as Two Slatterns and a King in 1921 (Masterplots, pg. 1). While she was in Greenwich, she met her first significant fling, Floyd Dell, a socialist playwright, because she was cast as the lead in his play, The Angel Intrudes at the Provincetown Playhouse (Contemporary Authors Online 4-5). From 1917-1918, she was Dell’s lover.

Next was fellow poet Arthur Ficke. He had also entered in the competition with Lyric Year (Fried, pg. 2-3) and since reading Renascence had corresponded with Millay via post. She finally met him in 1918, while he, a married man, was on his way to a military posting in France; they had a three-day affair, and didn’t touch each other again, but remembered and remained friends always (Quartermain 7). She wrote sonnets dedicated to him that were published in Reedy’s Mirror and collected in Second April (Contemporary Authors Online 5). When his marriage began to hit the rocks, she was in Europe and he became close to Gladys Brown (Quartermain 11).

In the 1920s, she was courted by two of the editors of Vanity Fair (where some of her poems and essays were being published): John Pearle Bishop and Edmund Wilson, who proposed marriage in August of 1920 (Contemporary Authors Online 6). Sickly and on the verge of a break-down, she visited Europe for two years on a regular salary from a different Vanity Fair editor, Frank Crowninshield. There she wrote short stories and essays under the penname Nancy Boyd (Contemporary Authors Online 6; Quartermain 9), which she later collected in the book Distressing Dialogues. In 1922, she brought her mother to Europe on her savings (Quartermain 12) instead of financing a visit to Witter Bynner (another entrant in the Lyric Year competition and the best friend of Arthur Ficke), whom she had promised to marry, if, after his long-distance proposal, she could speak to him in person about the matter. When she did talk to him, it was too late, and the ardor had cooled (Wheatley 13).

She was the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize, in 1923, for The Ballad of the Harp Weaver (Masterplots, pg.1-2), which is suspected to be a metaphor for her own mother’s diligence and sacrifices. Her prominence and promiscuity combined to win her the unofficial ex-post-facto title of a “New Woman,” of the roaring 20s – unafraid to live, love, or be successful.

Soon afterward, she met the Dutch widower of feminist Inez Milholland (Contemporary Authors Online 8), Eugen Jan Boissevain while playing charades at a party (Quartermain 12) and in July of 1923 (Wheatley 18) married him. He became her manager, and they toured the world together, reading her pieces to assemblies and on the radio. They maintained an “open marriage” sleeping with whomever they pleased, but remaining committed to each other. She was sickly, and he spent much of his time taking care of her. After she regained her strength, they toured the Orient, India and France (Quartermain 14). They bought a house named Steepletop, near Austerlitz, New York and kept it for the rest of their lives (Gray 4; Wheatley 18).

She was awarded an honorary “Litt. D.” degree from Tufts University in 1925 – the first of many (Contemporary Authors Online 1; Quartermain 14). Once a member, she withdrew herself from the League of American Penwomen, out of sympathy for the criticized and expelled Elinor Wylie, who went against societal mores and was living with a married man in 1927 (Quartermain 14).
In its rejection of a conservative value system, this was similar to, if far more politically innocuous than, her involvement in the Sacco-Vanzetti case: on August 27, 1927 she was arrested for protesting Sacco and Vanzetti’s Massachusetts prosecution in a murder, as she felt it was primarily and unjustly based on their status as Italian anarchists (Contemporary Authors Online 9). Their plight inspired her poem, “Justice Denied in Massachusetts.”

The same year, she published the libretto for an opera, The King’s Henchmen, for a score by Deems Taylor (Gray 25).

In 1936, she helped George Dillon, for whom she wrote the sonnet collection Fatal Interview (Contemporary Authors Online 9-10) and with whom she had her last serious affair, translate Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (Gray 29).

Conversation at Midnight (1937), is Millay’s most controversial work, a script for a play that was destroyed in a hotel fire while Millay was visiting Florida and then reworked/rewritten afterwards (Quartermain 17).

With the advent of World War II, her writing transformed. Like many “Lost Generation” writers, it became dull and trite – mostly pro-preparedness propaganda published in the volume, Make Bright the Arrows: 1940 Notebook. She had previously been a pacifist (Contemporary Authors Online 11-12), and most of her poetry had documented love, both fickle and true. Critics accuse her of mimicking the style of both Anna Hempstead Branch and Robert Frost (Sister M. Madeleva, pg. 309, Hall), but yet both Madeleva and Harriet Monroe compare her to Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rosetti, and Emily Dickenson (pg. 310, Hall). Monroe even adds Emily Bronte to the list (pg. 307, Hall). Millay also wrote “The Murder of Lidice,” at the commission of the Writer’s War Board, detailing the decimation of a Czechoslovakian town and the genocide of its citizens. Later, she regretted the piece (Gray 28).

Millay had a nervous breakdown in 1944 for about 2 years (Contemporary Authors Online 12), which her husband tried to nurse her through. When he died in 1949 – from a stroke after removal of a lung (Contemporary Authors Online 12), she collapsed into drunken depression, and died shortly thereafter of heart failure on October 19, 1940 (Quartermain 18) at Steepletop. She was found on the stairs holding the copy of Rolfe Humphries’ translation of the Aeneid that he had sent her to edit (Gray 4). While she didn’t realize it at the time she wrote “And do you think that love itself,” her prediction within was correct: without Eugen, her sole constant, she could not continue to live.

Her sister, Norma, had Mine the Harvest published for her posthumously (Fried 14).

Works Cited

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 45: American Poets, 1880-1945, First Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Peter Quartermain, University of British Columbia. The Gale Group, 1986. pp. 264-276.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 249: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, Third Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Christopher Wheatley, Catholic University of America. The Gale Group, 2001. pp. 238-244.

“Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes.” Brainy Quotes. 10 Apr. 2008.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/edna_st_vincent_millay.html

“Edna St. Vincent Millay.” Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2004. 02/25/2004.
http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=leag71982&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=1&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13022283&n=10&docNum=H1000068563&ST=edna+st.+vincent+millay&bConts=278447

“EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY.” Debra Fried. Modern American Writers. Pages 287-302. Copyright 1991. Charles Scribner’s Sons. The Scribner Writers Series.

“EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY.” James Gray. American Writers Vol. 3. Pages 122-144. Copyright 1974. Charles Scribner’s Sons. The Scribner Writers Series.

“Edna St. Vincent Millay.” Masterplots Complete 2000. CD-ROM. Hackensack, NJ: Salem Press, 2000.

“Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950).” Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Sharon K. Hall. Vol. 4. Detroit: Gale Research, 1981. 305-323. Literature Criticism Online. Gale. Clear Brook High School. 24 March 2008.
http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitCrit?af=RN&ae=FJ3549350021&srchtp=a&ste=14

Everyone who knew me,
 knew.
You knew me too,
didn’t you?

Oh, my love
This lust
Is not well-intentioned
Not innocent
Not sweet
Oh, my love
This lust
Demands satiation
Immediate and
Indiscreet.

‘Twixt you and I,
nothing should ever intercede -
not conspiring mothers,
not pernicious lovers,
not distance,
not time,
not cloth.
‘Twixt you and I,
nothing should ever intervene.