Edna St. Vincent Millay

      Born in Rockland, Maine on February 22, 1892, Edna St. Vincent Millay, or Vincent, as she was called by her family and friend, began writing in her youth. Att the tender age of twenty, she won literary acclaim for her poem "Renascence", which was published in The Lyric Year in 1912. The national acclaim brought with it the admiration of Caroline B. Dow whom urged Vincent to go on to Vassar college and whom offered to take care of any financial arrangements that would not be fulfilled from a scholarship. Vincent agreed and was admitted to Vassar college.

      Vincent was impressive, her relation to nature, beauty, love, was striking, her form feminine and unafraid, and she continued to win the admiration of those interested in up and coming young writers. While at Vassar, she participated in theater productions and even wrote plays of her own. The Princess Marries the Page, which she wrote, directed and starred in, was brought to the stage in her senior year, and along with The Wall of Dominos, focused critical attention on other areas of her talent. She finished her education at Vassar and moved to New York where she found herself attracted to the bohemian lifestyle that was Greenwich Village. Here she lived with her sister, taking parts in plays produced by the Provincetown Players, for which she received no money. But she survived, and her poetry took on a more mature voice while still maintaining its innocent appeal to love and nature.

      With her fame slowly rising, Vincent became a feminist voice in a time of questioning. The 1920's literary movement questioned the politics of the time, and Vincent s work resounded with the fears and dissatisfaction of such. Her poem "The Armistice Day Parade", was born from her worry over militarism, and her play The King s Henchman, was produced and received with as much enthusiastic praise by her literary community. Her career was on the rise, though Vincent was troubled with health issues and mental distress. She had fallen in love with a man, Arthur Davidson Ficke, whom was married, and although she was to love others, it was his love that held her.

      Vincent continued to write and her work became more politically outspoken to the dismay of many of her admirers. Collected Sonnets and Collected Lyrics, both published in the 1940's, deterred many of her admiring critics and they lost interest in the poet whose work had inspired an American sense of beauty and youth twenty years before. Though compared to Frost and Robinson as examples of American voice, Vincent s work would begin to go unappreciated.

      Almost fifty years after her death in 1950, and with the growing attraction of Feminism, much of her work is being reexamined, its beauty uncovered. Vincent wrote of love for men and love for women, of beauty both in nature as well as in the human, of youth and the emotions contained, and although many of these works have been ignored and unpraised for too long, her genius is still evident to one approaching her poetry today. Time has been unable to tarnish the magnificence of Millay s work, though it has been neglected for so long.