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Z Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) LINKS
http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=161
This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Edna St. Vincent Millay including a BIOGRAPHY, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/millay/millay.htm
This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links on Edna St. Vincent Millay.
BIOGRAPHY
Millay was born in Rockland, Maine to Henry Tollman Millay, a schoolteacher, and Cora Millay, who became a nurse after divorcing her husband in 1900 and moving her family to Camden, Maine. In her teen years, Millay showed early literary talent in editing her school magazine and publishing in
St.
Nicholas Magazine. Based in part on her poem "Renascence," published in
The Lyric Year, Millay received a scholarship from the National Training School of the YWCA to attend Vassar College, where she studied literature and was active in the Vassar drama department. In 1917, the year of her graduation, she published
Renascence and Other Poems, and became a part of the lively Bohemian community of Greenwich Village. As a member of the Provincetown Players, she befriended such notable modernist intellectuals as Edmund Wilson, Floyd Dell, and Susan Glaspell. In 1920, Millay published
A Few Figs from Thistles followed by her Pulitzer Prize winning volume
The Harp Weaver in 1923. That year Millay married Eugene Boissevain who encouraged Millay's literary career as well as her unconventional, bisexual orientation in her extra-marital relations with others. Boissevain helped to promote Millay's literary career through managing her reading schedule in the mid-1920s. In 1927 Millay published a libretto for
The King's Henchman that had a successful premier at New York's Metropolitan Opera. That same year, Millay became committed to the leftist struggle over the murder conviction of two Italian labor agitators Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Millay's protest of the Sacco-Vanzetti case reflected her socialist commitments that are evident in her 1927 poem "Justice Denied in Massachusetts." Two years later Millay was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters followed by a similar accolade in 1940 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Millay's antifascist stances in the Spanish Civil War and her protest of Nazism are featured in such volumes of verse as
Huntsman,
What Quarry? (1939),
Make Bright the Arrows (1940) and
The Murder of Lidice (1942). Owing in part to her chronic alcoholism, Millay suffered a nervous breakdown in 1944 followed by the death of her husband to cancer in 1949. A year later, Millay also passed away leaving behind a rich corpus of verse gathered in her
Collected Lyrics (1943) and the
Collected Poems (1949, 1956).
SECONDARY SOURCES
Dickie, Margaret and Thomas Travisano, Eds.
Gendered Modernisms:
American Woman Poets and their Readers. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.
Epstein, Daniel Mark.
What My Lips Have Kissed:
The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St.
Vincent Millay. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.
Freedman, Diane P., Ed.
Millay at 100:
A Critical Reappraisal. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995.
Milford, Nancy.
Savage Beauty:
The Life of Edna St.
Vincent Millay. New York: Random House, 2001.
Thesing, William B., Ed.
Critical Essays on Edna St.
Vincent Millay. New York: G. K. Hall, 1993.
SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER 
