"It was at a party in Greenwich Village, in the spring of 1920, that the critic Edmund Wilson first encountered Edna St. Vincent Millay in the flesh. Wilson, a well-bred graduate of Princeton, was a fan of the twenty-eight-year-old poet’s work—he’d taken to reciting one of her sonnets in the shower—but he was, in her physical presence, overcome. Years later, Wilson described the evening: “She was one of those women whose features are not perfect and who in their moments of dimness may not seem even pretty, but who, excited by the blood or the spirit, become almost supernaturally beautiful.” He remained in love with her for years, even after she’d refused his offer of marriage. It was as if he were enchanted, caught under the “spell” that she cast on “all ages and both sexes.”
This enchantress is the Millay whom many came to know. She was a siren, a seductress, a candle burning with a “lovely light” before being unceremoniously snuffed out. (Millay died at fifty-eight, of a heart attack, after falling down the stairs in her home.) Her appeal was legendary, as was her voice, which the poet Louis Untermeyer described as “the sound of the ax on fresh wood.” In her youth, she loved widely and shamelessly, and she was adored by a generation of young women for the verses she wrote about her transient attachments. Today, she is often remembered as the “poet-girl” of the Roaring Twenties, traipsing from bed to bed in downtown Manhattan, if she is remembered at all.
“Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay” (Yale) aims to capitalize on that salacious reputation. In an introduction, the book’s editor, Daniel Mark Epstein, describes Millay as “the bad girl of American letters,” a “bed-hopping” radical whose escapades rivalled Lord Byron’s. Epstein, a poet himself and the author of a 2001 biography of Millay, has compiled all Millay’s available journals, from her teen-age years on. A foreword by the scholar Holly Peppe, Millay’s literary executor, promises readers a “wild and dangerous ride” filled with “delicious new details” about Millay’s life.
Like so many ardent vows, this is not to be trusted. Millay was an irregular diary keeper; as she wrote in 1927, “This book never gets written in, except when there’s nothing to write.” She didn’t appear to keep a diary at all between 1914 and 1920, the period when her career took off, and Epstein includes fewer than a dozen entries from the seven years after that. The diaries thus shed no light on Millay’s youthful affairs, or on the composition of her reputation-making poems, later collected in “A Few Figs from Thistles” (1920), “Second April” (1921), and “The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems” (1922). Indeed, there is little in the diaries about her creative process, besides an occasional note that she “stayed in bed as usual & worked until noon.” And the most scandalous entries, about her addiction to morphine, will already be familiar to readers of Epstein’s biography or of Nancy Milford’s superior book, “Savage Beauty.”
What the diaries do reveal is that this supposedly ethereal creature was in fact solidly earthbound. As a teen-ager, Millay described the effects of hard domestic labor on her body (“my poor hands are blistered in a dozen places”); later, rich and married, she wrote about the joy she felt “spading & pulling” in her garden. She tracked the changing seasons, dutifully recording the spring’s first bluebird and the comings and goings of herbs. She also recorded mounting bodily ailments: headaches, stomach aches, hangovers, nerve pain in her shoulder and back, exhaustion.
If Millay was a consummate performer, entrancing suitors and selling out lecture halls, the diaries are a record of life offstage. After her marriage, in 1923, her days were quiet—sometimes dull and sometimes lovely—though periodically interrupted by the demands of the public, which threatened to withdraw its affections as literary tastes changed. The diaries do not give us much insight into Millay’s loves and love poems. But they do offer a compelling portrait of what it’s like to live in a mortal, aging body, in a society that insists that its female stars remain beautiful and forever young.
Millay never really had a chance to be a child. Born in 1892 in Rockland, Maine, Vincent, as she was known throughout her childhood, was the eldest of three daughters. Her mother, Cora, a travelling nurse with an artistic streak, divorced her children’s dissolute father in 1901. For a few years, she and the girls moved around New England before finally settling in Camden, Maine, where they rented a small house in “the ‘bad’ section of town,” as Millay later described it. Starting when Millay was nine, Cora would leave home for weeks at a time, while Millay ran the household and cared for her sisters. Cora nurtured Millay’s literary inclinations; when she wasn’t travelling, she read Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” to her daughter. Soon, Millay was sending poems to the children’s publication St. Nicholas and winning cash prizes of five dollars. Despite the stereotype, poetry and poverty are often incompatible. After Millay graduated from high school, she faced a rather dreary adult life. College was cost-prohibitive, so she began working twelve-hour days at home, cleaning, cooking, washing, and ironing. Her creativity went slack. “I’m getting old and ugly,” she wrote in her diary in October, 1911. “I can feel my face dragging down. I can feel the lines coming underneath my skin. . . . I love beauty more than anything else in the world and I can’t take time to be pretty.” At nineteen, she was lonely. She began writing in her diary to an imaginary lover, and their fantasy assignations broke up the monotony.
It was under these conditions that Millay began to compose “Renascence,” the poem that would change her life. In twenty stanzas of rhyming tetrameter, Millay describes a crisis of faith: a speaker, cramped by a sense of the physical world’s finitude, is suddenly overcome by the forces of “Infinity” and “Eternity,” dies, is buried, longs to return to the world aboveground, and then is reborn with a renewed sense of the soul’s capaciousness. When the poem was published, in 1912, in the anthology “The Lyric Year,” readers were struck by the maturity of its themes. The poet Arthur Ficke, who would become one of Millay’s long-term lovers, wrote to the anthology’s editor in disbelief: “No sweet young thing of twenty ever ended a poem precisely where this one ends: it takes a brawny male of forty-five to do that.”
For all its precocity, the poem can also be understood as a young woman’s effort to reckon with the limitations of a stifling life in Maine. “Renascence” opens with the speaker gazing upon three mountains, like the ones Millay had been climbing all her life:
All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I’d started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.
The repetition at the beginning and the end reinforces the sense of claustrophobia: the speaker is trapped in familiar territory. But, after she’s reborn, the same landscape delights her: “About the trees my arms I wound / Like one gone mad I hugged the ground.” It’s as if Millay were reconciling herself to her circumstances—and realizing, perhaps, that the broader world might be more than she could bear.
She soon had a chance to see for herself. After Millay recited “Renascence” at a party, one of the guests, impressed by her poise, offered to connect her with friends who could pay her way through Vassar. Millay enrolled in the fall of 1913, and threw herself into campus life, attending parties, starring in plays, and dating several of her wealthier classmates. (Vassar was all female, and romances between young women were common at the time.) She was also rebellious, skipping class to write poems and leaving the Poughkeepsie campus—a “hellhole,” she called it—without permission. Most of the time, her brilliant work saved her from formal sanction; when it didn’t, friends came to her rescue. In 1917, at the end of Millay’s senior year, the faculty voted to suspend her indefinitely. More than a hundred classmates signed a petition, and she was allowed to graduate on time.
For Epstein, Millay was, at this point, like a “princess in a fairytale,” scooped from the ashes and set down among the cultural ;lite. The diaries, however, show not a princess but a tired young woman with a sensitive stomach: she would run herself ragged trying to write, study, and socialize, and eventually end up “sick abed all day.” This pattern—taking on too many commitments, then suffering the physical consequences—would continue for the rest of her life. Some have seen here evidence of Millay’s frailty or hypochondria, others her need to be fussed over and adored. But gaining adoration—putting her talent and charm to dazzling effect—had brought Millay to college, bought her food and dresses, and won her scholarships. It may well have seemed worth the hangover".
"The New Yorker"