Millay, Edna St. Vincent

MILLAY, EDNA ST. VINCENT (1892 – 1950). An American poet and playwright, Millay is known as a writer of sonnets and as an ardent feminist, sympathetic to the causes of the Left.

Born in Rockland, Maine, Millay won fourth place in a poetry contest for The Lyric Year for “Renascence,” written at age nineteen. This adolescent triumph prompted a wealthy arts patron to pay for her education at Vassar. In 1917, when her first book of poems appeared, she moved to Greenwich Village and quickly became a celebrity. As a biographer wrote, she was "the unrivaled embodiment of sex appeal, the It-girl of the hour, the Miss America of 1920.” Vanity Fair called her the “most poignant lyricist of the younger generation.” In 1923, she became the third woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The same year, she married forty-three-year-old Eugen Jan Boissevain (1880–1949), the widower of famed woman suffrage martyr Inez Milholland. Two years later, the couple bought a 635-acre farm near Austerlitz, New York, where they both lived until their deaths.

During her Greenwich Village days, “Vincent” Millay found herself among the many artists and writers on the bohemian Left. Among her lovers of the time, Floyd Dell and John Reed stood out as radical celebrities. She wrote an anti-war, one-act play, Aria da Capo, performed by the Provincetown Players, and published poetry that questioned and often ridiculed the male world order for making war and oppressing women.

Millay became a truly public political poet in 1927 when she attempted to put her celebrity to work to save the lives of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. She walked a picket line in protest of their impending execution and managed to interview Massachusetts Governor Alvan Fuller and plead for clemency. Several of her most famous writings sprang from the notorious trial and punishment. Her poem “Justice Denied in Massachusetts,” appeared in The New York Times on August 22, 1927, two days before Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. Her essay “Fear,” published in Outlook on November 9, called out the propaganda against supposed anarchist terrorism, describing the real terrorism as the extension of a rightwing mentality all too common in the United States.

The Great Depression and rise of Fascism prompted some of her most important work. Conversations at Midnight (1937), a four-part poem set in an all-male dinner party hosted by a liberal and agnostic host whose seven guests come from across the political and social spectrum. Chosen as the year's best book of poetry by literary reviewers and journalists for the Saturday Review of Literature, Conversations at Midnight was followed by the ardently anti-fascist “Say That We Saw Spain Die” in the October 1938 issue of Harper’s Magazine; and by the five-sonnet sequence “From a Town in a State of Siege” in March 1939. By her sympathies and writings, Millay had associated herself with the Popular Front.

An anti-fascist poem broadcast on nation-wide radio in October 1942 gave Millay a vastly wider audience. Asked by the War Writers Board for a poem to commemorate the horrific Nazi destruction of the entire Czech village, Lidice, suspected of sheltering underground leaders, she responded enthusiastically. The public response to “Murder in Lidice” was overwhelmingly positive, but critics condemned her work, attacking the poem as a fumbling poetic gesture, trivializing the tragedy. She countered that her political poems had been proudly written with "an ulterior motive, such as, for instance the winning of a world war to keep democracy alive.” Badly injured in an automobile accident, Millay suffered from alcohol and drug addiction and fell down a flight of stairs to her death in her home.

Atkins Elizabeth. Edna St. Vincent Millay and Her Times. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1936.

Chasar, Mike. “Receiving Millay” in Poetry Unbound: Poems and New Media from the Magic
Lantern to Instagram. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020.

Newcomb, John Timberman (1995) "The Woman as Political Poet: Edna St. Vincent Millay and
the Mid-Century Cannon,” Criticism: Vol. 37 : Iss. 2, Article 4.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol37/iss2/4

Schweik, Susan. A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

Edna St. Vincent Millay. Works by or about. Internet Archive.

Edna St. Vincent Millay Papers, 1928-1941. Summary & Finding Guide. Columbia University Libraries. https://findingaids.library.columbia.edu/ead/nnc-rb/ldpd_4078418