Out Spotlight CVIX

Today's Out Spotlight is poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay. She was a major poetic voice of the rebellious Jazz Age. And has been hailed as the greatest

female poet since Sappho of ancient Greece.

Born in Rockland, Maine, on February 22, 1892 Millay and her two sisters were raised by her mother, Cora, in an unconventional family from which her father Henry was asked to leave when she was seven by her mother at least in part because of his gambling. Her mother encouraged her daughters to be ambitious and self-sufficient, teaching them an appreciation of music and literature from an early age.

Millay's first known lover, Floyd Dell, reported that "'Her mother had expected a son, and when the child was a girl, she brought her up, she told me, like a son--to be self-reliant and fearless and ambitious.'"

In 1912, at her mother's urging, twenty year old Millay entered her poem "Renascence" into a contest, winning fourth place and publication in The Lyric Year. In the immediate aftermath of The Lyric Year, a wealthy woman named Caroline B. Dow heard Millay reciting her poetry and playing the piano at the Whitehall Inn in Camden, Maine, and was so impressed that she offered to pay for her education at Vassar College There, she continued to write poetry and became involved in the theater.

While playing the lead in her own play, The Princess Marries the Page at Vassar, she was approached by the British actress Edith Wynne Matthison, who, excited by the performance, came backstage to kiss Millay and invite her to her summer home. Millay felt great passion in the kiss and the two exchanged letters, providing one of her few known straightforward pronouncements of lesbian love:

"You wrote me a beautiful letter,--I wonder if you meant it to be as beautiful as it was.--I think you did; for somehow I know that your feeling for me, however slight it is, is of the nature of love. . . . When you tell me to come, I will come, by the next train, just as I am. This is not meekness, be assured; I do not come naturally by meekness; know that it is a proud surrender to You."

Millay also had several relationships with other women while at Vassar. In 1917, the year of her graduation, Millay published her first book, Renascence and Other Poems. At the request of Vassar's drama department, she also wrote her first verse play, The Lamp and the Bell (1921), a work about love between women.

In January 1921 she went to Paris, where she met sculptor Thelma Wood, with whom she had a romantic relationship. Millay, whose friends called her "Vincent," then moved to New York's Greenwich Village, where she led a notoriously Bohemian life. She lived in the nine-foot-wide attic of the house owned by the Cherry Lane Theater that was renowned for being the smallest in New York City. She wrote anything she could find an editor willing to accept. She and the other writers of Greenwich Village were, according to Millay herself, "very, very poor and very, very merry."

She joined the Provincetown Players in their early days, and befriended writers such as Witter Bynner, Edmund Wilson, Susan Glaspell, and Floyd Dell, who asked for Millay's hand in marriage. She refused a proposal from Dell, who wanted to cure her of her "Sapphic tendencies," believing that marriage would confine her to traditional female roles. She was openly bisexual having a series of affairs with men or women, expressing not only her belief that love was temporary but also an unwillingness to commit to a man or woman.

Millay published A Few Figs from Thistles in 1920, a volume of poetry which drew much attention for its controversial descriptions of female sexuality and feminism. In 1923 her fourth volume of poems, The Harp Weaver, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. She was the first woman to be so honored for poetry. Poet Laurette Robert Frost viewed her as his most serious competitor and feared she would be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters ahead of him.

In addition to publishing three plays in verse, Millay also wrote the libretto of one of the few American grand operas, The King's Henchman in 1927. In 1943 she was awarded the Frost Medal for her lifetime contribution to American poetry. She was the sixth recipient of that honor, and the second woman.

Millay married Eugen Boissevain, a self-proclaimed feminist and widower of Inez Milholland, in 1923. Boissevain gave up his own pursuits to manage Millay's literary career, setting up the readings and public appearances for which Millay grew quite famous. According to her own accounts, the couple acted liked two bachelors, remaining "sexually open" throughout their twenty-six-year marriage.

Biographers have speculated that Millay found in Boissevain the mother she had yearned for since childhood; however, Boissevain, though attending to Millay's needs, did not foster the independent spirit typical of her younger years.

Once at a cocktail party, Millay discussed her recurrent headaches with a psychologist who asked her about her attraction to women. Millay exclaimed, "'Oh, you mean I'm homosexual! Of course I am, and heterosexual too, but what's that got to do with my headache?'" They were married until Boissevain's death in 1949. Edna St. Vincent Millay died in 1950.

Excerpt of "Renascence" from Renascence and Other Poems:

"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."