Read complete books and articles on: Edna St. Vincent Millay

Millay, Edna St. Vincent - mĭlāˈ, 1892–1950, American poet, b. Rockland, Maine, grad. Vassar College, 1917. One of the most popular poets of her era, Millay was admired as much for the bohemian freedom of her youthful lifestyle as for her verse. During the early 1920s she lived in Greenwich Village, New York City, and wrote satiric sketches for Vanity Fair under the

Renascence, her first volume of poetry, appeared in 1917 and was praised for its freshness and vitality. It was followed by A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), Second April (1921), and The Ballad of the Harp Weaver (1922; Pulitzer Prize). She also was a member of the Provincetown Players, a group that produced several of her verse dramas, including Aria da Capo (1920) and Two Slatterns and a King (1921).

In 1923 she married Eugen Jan Boissevain, a Dutch coffee importer, and moved to "Steepletop," a farm near Austerlitz, N.Y. Although her socially conscious later poetry is generally considered inferior to her early work, it exhibits her absolute mastery of the sonnet form. Among her later volumes are Fatal Interview (1931), a superb sonnet cycle; Conversation at Midnight (1937); and Make Bright the Arrows (1940). She also wrote the libretto for Deems Taylor's opera The King's Henchman (1927) and, with George Dillon, she translated Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil (1936). Eugen Boissevain died in the autumn of 1949, and Millay died less than a year later. In 1976, "Steepletop" opened as an arts colony.

See her collected poems, ed. by N. Millay (1956); her letters, ed. by A. R. Macdougal (1952); biographies by J. Gould (1969), D. M. Epstein (2001), and N. Milford (2001); study by N. A. Brittin (rev. ed. 1982).

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14 of the Best Books and Articles on: Edna St. Vincent Millay

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

A Few Figs From Thistles: Poems and Sonnets » Read Now
by Edna St. Vincent Millay. 39 pgs.

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...FIGS FROM THISTLES BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY THE HARP-WEAVER AND OTHERS...POEMS AND SONNETS BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY Publishers HARPER BROTHERS...THISTLES Copyright...
2.

Collected Lyrics of Edna St. Vincent Millay » Read Now
by Edna St. Vincent Millay. 386 pgs.

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...COLLECTED LYRICS Books by St. Edna Vincent Millay THE DUCK IN THE SNOW...Collected Lyrics of St. Edna Vincent Millay Harper Brothers Publishers...1937, 1938, 1939, by Edna...
3.

Collected Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay » Read Now
by Edna St. Vincent Millay. 161 pgs.

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...SONNETS Collected Sonnets of St. Edna Vincent Millay 1817 Harper Row, Publishers...1938, 1939, 1940, 1941, by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Printed in the United...
4.

Millay in Greenwich Village » Read Now
by Anne Cheney. 164 pgs.

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5.

Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal » Read Now
by Diane P. Freedman. 224 pgs.

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...title page, portrait of Edna St. Vincent Millay, photograph by Mishkin...Quotation from the work of Edna St. Vincent Millay appearing in this volume...references and index...
6.

The Woman as Political Poet: Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Mid-Century Canon, in Criticism » Read Now
by John Timberman Newcomb. 19 pgs.

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...woman as political poet: Edna St. Vincent Millay and the mid-century canon...For most of this century Edna St. Vincent Millay was among the most widely-known...Everyone...
7.

Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism (Chap. 8 "A Fitting Form Edna St. Vincent Millay and Petrarchism") » Read Now
by Mary B. Moore. 298 pgs.

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"How do I love thee? Let me mount the ways", wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her Sonnets from the Portuguese. Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism proposes that we attend to the ways that women poets from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries have both echoed and transformed...
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"How do I love thee? Let me mount the ways", wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her Sonnets from the Portuguese. Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism proposes that we attend to the ways that women poets from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries have both echoed and transformed the literary and erotic conventions that strongly influenced their fates as women, wives, and lovers.
Mary B. Moore analyzes and provides context for love sonnet sequences by Italian, French, English, and American women poets in the light of current knowledge concerning attitudes women at the time they wrote. Through close readings of the poems combined with theory and criticism about constructs of women, historical events, and biographical contexts, Moore reveals patterns of revision among women poets that shed further light on the poets themselves, on Petrarchism as a convention, and on ideas about women. She focuses on Petrarchan sonnet sequences by women because the poems serve both as works of art and as documents that illuminate the range and limitations of female roles as erotic subjects (agents of speech, action, knowledge, and desire) as well as their more usual roles as erotic objects.
Combining theory with close reading, Moore enhances the value of many generally neglected poems by women. After a thorough discussion of the Petrachan sonnet tradition, she analyzes the work of Gaspara Stampa, Louise Labe, Lady Mary Wroth, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
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8.

Faith of a (Woman) Writer (Chap. 15 "Edna St. Vincent Millay--Saint of the Modern Sonnet") » Read Now
by Alice Kessler-Harris, William Mcbrien. 358 pgs.

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Reflecting the salient undercurrents of contemporary researh on women writers, this volume is an appraisal of the work of the writer as woman and presents critics' perceptions about how women writers have dealt with the complexity of changing female visions in the 20th century. Each of the 34...
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Reflecting the salient undercurrents of contemporary researh on women writers, this volume is an appraisal of the work of the writer as woman and presents critics' perceptions about how women writers have dealt with the complexity of changing female visions in the 20th century. Each of the 34 essays, contributed by some of today's most distinguished writers, speaks to the work of a particular 20th-century woman writer, and each constitutes a contribution to the scholarly debate.
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9.

Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York's Literary Women (Chap. 1 "Edna St. Vincent Millay") » Read Now
by Nina Miller. 292 pgs.

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In the teens and twenties, New York was home to a rich variety of literary subcultures. Within these intermingled worlds, gender lines and other boundaries were crossed in ways that were hardly imaginable in previous decades. Among the bohemians of Greenwich Village, the sophisticates of the...
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In the teens and twenties, New York was home to a rich variety of literary subcultures. Within these intermingled worlds, gender lines and other boundaries were crossed in ways that were hardly imaginable in previous decades. Among the bohemians of Greenwich Village, the sophisticates of the Algonquin Round Table, and the literati of the Harlem Renaissance, certain women found fresh, powerful voices through which to speak and write. Enda St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker are now best remembered for their colorful lives; Genevieve Taggard, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Helene Johnson are hardly remembered at all. Yet each made a serious literary contribution to the meaning of modern femininity, relationship, and selfhood. Making Love Modern uncovers the deep historical sensitivity and interest in these women's love poetry. Placing their work in the context of subcultures nested within national culture, Nina Miller explores the tensions that make this literature so rewarding for contemporary readers. A poetry of intimate expression, it also functioned powerfully as public assertion. The writers themselves were high-profile embodiments of femininity, the local representatives of New Womanhood within their male-centered subcultural worlds. This book captures the literary lives of these woman as well as the complex subcultures they inhabited--Harlem, the Village, and glamorous midtown Manhattan.
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10.

Lectures on Some Modern Poets ("Edna St. Vincent Millay" p. 25) » Read Now
by Carnegie Institute of Technology. 92 pgs.

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...Margaret Foster LeClair Edna St. Vincent Millay Beekman W. Cottrell Poetic...poems or parts of poems by St. Edna Vincent Millay, published by Harper...copyright 1918, 1920...
11.

Renascence, and Other Poems » Read Now
by Edna St. Vincent Millay. 73 pgs.

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...OTHER POEMS RENASCENCE AND OTHER POEMS BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY HARPER BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON RENASCENCE COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY...
12.

The Princess Marries the Page: A Play in One Act » Read Now
by Edna St. Vincent Millay. 50 pgs.

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13.

The King's Henchman: A Play in Three Acts » Read Now
by Edna St. Vincent Millay. 136 pgs.

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...A Play in three Acts by St. Edna Vincent Millay HARPER BROTHERS PUBLISHERS...COPYRIGHT, 1926, 1927 BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. D-B...Knowest thou, we...
14.

American Women Writers, 1900-1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook ("Edna St. Vincent Millay" p. 231) » Read Now
by Laurie Champion, Emmanuel S. Nelson. 412 pgs.

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Women writers have been traditionally excluded from literary canons, not until recently have scholars begun to rediscover or discover neglected women writers and their works. This reference includes alphabetically arranged entries on 58 American women authors who wrote between 1900 and 1945, a...
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Women writers have been traditionally excluded from literary canons, not until recently have scholars begun to rediscover or discover neglected women writers and their works. This reference includes alphabetically arranged entries on 58 American women authors who wrote between 1900 and 1945, a period that embraces two major artistic movements, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes a biography, a discussion of major works and themes, a review of the author's critical reception, and extensive primary and secondary bibliographies. The volume reflects the diversity of American culture through its coverage of African American, Native American, Mexican American, and Chinese American women writers.
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