“My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!”
So were the words of Edna St. Vincent Millay, one of the most outstanding poets and feminists in American history.
It all started in a small house in Rockland, Maine, a house “between the mountains and the sea where baskets of apples and drying herbs on the porch mingled their scents with those of the neighbouring pine woods.”
Edna St. Vincent Millay – her peculiar middle-name deriving from St. Vincent Hospital, where doctors had saved her uncle’s life mere weeks before her birth – to nurse Cora Buzelle and schoolteacher Henry Millay.
Her parents divorced when Millay was eight, due to Henry’s frivolous nature, and so began a migratory, impoverished life for Cora, Edna, and her two younger sisters, Norma and Kathleen.
But what the family lacked in stability they made up for in culture. Wherever they travelled, Cora had a suitcase of books on hand, and would read to her children from the classical works of such as Shakespeare or Milton. Millay studied the piano and theatre, and learnt six languages in hopes of understanding more about people from around the world.
Perhaps it was this quest for understanding that lead Millay to refer to herself as Vincent, one of the many unpopular decisions that saw her the subject of ire from authority figures. In fact, her grade school principle was so against the name, that she referred to Millay by a variety of random female names starting with V.
Eventually, the family settled in Camden, on the property of an aunt, and it was here that Millay started to develop her literary skills, after being discouraged from a career in music because of her short fingers.
At the age of 14, while writing for Camden High School’s literary magazine, The Megunticook, Millay submitted a poem into the St. Nicholas League, a competition that ran in a monthly children’s magazine. It won, and she was awarded a gold badge. In time to come she would be joined on the list of winners and honorees by the likes of E.B. White, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
By the following year, Millay had been published in several magazines, including the highly regarded Current Literature.
In high school, she experimented sexually with both men and women, and started to form a feminist attitude in opposition to social expectations that would influence her future work.
But it was Renascence, her first long-form poem and one that she had been working on for several years, that started to bring Millay’s work to the attention of the greater public. In 1912, when Millay was 20 years old, her mother spotted the announcement of a poetry contest sponsored by The Lyric Year. She submitted it, and before long the editor of the anthology wrote to Millay, stating emphatically that he was sure the piece would be awarded first prize.
The other judges disagreed, and Renascence came in forth. Scandal followed. Even first place winner Orrick Johns felt Millay deserved the recognition, stating “the award was as much an embarrassment to me as a triumph”. Readers too revolted against the publication. Amidst the controversy, wealthy arts patron Caroline B. Dow heard Millay recite her poetry at Camden’s Whitehall Inn, and was so impressed that she paid for Millay to attend Vassar College in New York.
Following her four years of study, Millay moved to New York’s Greenwich Village. She lived in multiple houses, including 75-and-a-half Bedford St, renowned as the narrowest property in New York City.
These days, as Millay recalls, were “very, very poor and very, very merry”. She wrote hack pieces under a pseudonym for local magazines to get by, and dabbled for free in performance theatre. In years to come she and some friends would found the Cherry Lane Theater “to continue the staging of experimental drama”. Though she was offered a comfortable position as secretary to a local woman, Millay refused, in order to focus on her writing.
As the 1920s dawned, Millay transitioned from a frivolous young woman into an artistic activist. She wrote the anti-war play Aria da Capo, which starred her sister Norma, and it was said that she would enter court rooms with her pacifist friends to recite poetry while the juries deliberated on their cases.
It was Millay’s second volume of poems, A Few Figs from Thistles, that turned her into a national icon with its depictions of women’s rights, particularly in regards to sexuality. Her work started to appear in Vanity Fair, where one of the editors allowed her to travel to Paris, and write as she pleased.
During this time, Millay produced less poetry for the magazine, but under the pen name Nancy Boyd, delivered various other projects for publication.
In 1921 she released Second April, a collection that deviated from everything she had written before. But it was The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver, an anthology dedicated to her mother, that saw Millay reach the pinnacle of her career, when she became the third woman in history to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Millay returned to America where she married Eugen Jan Boissevain, a coffee importer and one of her many suitors. She was always worried that marriage would mean the end of her career, but in Boissevain, she found a supporter and self-proclaimed feminist, who happily took up all domestic responsibilities. They were married for 26 years, though both had other lovers throughout this time. For Millay, this included 22 year-old student George Dillion, who inspired the collection of sonnets entitled Fatal Interview.
World War II came, and in stark contrast to the pacifist ideals she had represented during WWI, worked in support of the war effort by producing propaganda for the Writers’ War Board. Her reputation was tarnished by her celebration of Allied Forces, but Millay continued, convinced she was doing the right thing.
1943 saw Millay become the sixth person and second woman to be awarded the Frost Medal in recognition of her lifetime contribution to American poetry.
In 1949, Boissevain died of lung cancer. The following year, Millay fell down the stairs in her house, and was found dead some eight hours later by a caretaker. She was only 58.
Sister Norma and her husband, painter/actor Charles Frederick Ellis, moved to Millay’s home, Steepletop, shortly after her death. In 1973, they established the Millay Colony for the Arts on the 635-acre property., and in 2010 the farmhouse was converted into a museum.
In 2015, Millay was named one of the 31 Icons of 2015’s LBGT History Month.
“What should I be
but just what I am?”
Yes, though her life was short, it was indelibly bright. Whether it was sexuality or the fight against Hitler, Edna St. Vincent Millay was never dissuaded from writing about what she felt mattered, and that is something worth remembering.