Early life
Millay was born in Rockland, Maine to Cora Lounella, a nurse, and Henry Tollman Millay, a schoolteacher who would later become superintendent of schools. Her middle name derives from St. Vincent's Hospital in New York, where her uncle's life had been saved just prior to her birth. The house was "between the mountains and the sea where baskets of apples and drying herbs on the porch mingled their scents with those of the neighboring pine woods." In 1904, Cora officially divorced Millay's father for financial irresponsibility, but they had been separated for some years prior. Struggling financially, Cora and her three daughters, Edna (who called herself "Vincent"), Norma, and Kathleen, moved from town to town, living in poverty. Cora traveled with a trunk full of classic literature, including Shakespeare and Milton, which she read to her children. The family settled in a small house on the property of Cora's aunt in Camden, Maine, where Millay would write the first of the poems that would bring her literary fame.
The three sisters were independent and spoke their minds, which did not always sit well with the authority figures in Millay's life. Her grade school principal, offended by her frank attitudes, refused to call her Vincent. Instead, he called her by any woman's name that started with a V.) At Camden High School Millay began developing her literary talents, starting at the school's literary magazine, The Megunticook. At 14 she won the St. Nicholas Gold Badge for poetry and by 15 she had published her poetry in the popular children's magazine St. Nicholas, the Camden Herald and the high profile anthology Current Literature. While at school she had several relationships with women, including Edith Wynne Matthison who would go on to become an actress in silent films. Millay entered Vassar college at 21, later than usual, having relationships with several fellow students during her time there. In January 1921, she went to Paris, where she met and befriended sculptor Thelma Wood.Millay’s celebrity began in 1912 when she entered her poem “Renascence” into a poetry contest in The Lyric Year. The poem was widely considered the best submission and when it was ultimately placed fourth, it created a scandal for which Millay received much publicity. The first place winner Orrick Johns was among those who felt that “Renascence” was the best poem and stated that “the award was as much an embarrassment to me as a triumph", a second-prize winner offering Millay his $250 prize money. In the immediate aftermath of The Lyric Year controversy, 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 Millay’s education at Vassar College. Millay moved to New York City after graduation in 1917.
Career
Millay lived in a number of places in Greenwich Village, including a house owned by the Cherry Lane Theatre, renowned for being the smallest in New York City. Red-haired and beautiful, the critic Floyd Dell write that she was "a frivolous young woman, with a brand-new pair of dancing slippers and a mouth like a valentine." Millay described her life in New York as "very, very poor and very, very merry." Openly bisexual at the time, her close friends of the time included the writers Witter Bynner and Susan Glaspell, as well as Floyd Dell and critic Edmund Wilson, who both unsuccessfully proposed marriage to her.
Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923 for "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver", the second woman to win the poetry prize. Her 1920 collection A Few Figs From Thistles drew controversy for its new exploration of female sexuality and feminism. In 1921 she wrote the anti-war play "Aria da Capo" and her reputation was damaged by the poetry she wrote about the Allied war effort during World War II. Merle Rubin noted: "She seems to have caught more flak from the literary critics for supporting democracy than Ezra Pound did for championing fascism." In the New York Times she mourned the Nazi massacre of the Czechoslovak city of Lidice:
The whole world holds in its arms todayThe murdered village of Lidice,Like the murdered body of a little child.
In 1923 she married 43 year old Eugen Jan Boissevain (1880 -1949), the widower of labor lawyer and war correspondent Inez Milholland, a political icon Millay had known while living Greenwich village. A 'self-proclaimed feminist', Boissevain greatly supported her career and took primary care of domestic responsibilities. This relationship was 'sexually open', with both taking other lovers throughout their twenty-six-year marriage. Millay's most significant other relationship during this time was with the poet George Dillon, who was fourteen years her junior, and for whom a number of her sonnets were written.
In 1925, Boissevain and Millay bought Steepletop near Austerlitz, New York, which had been a blueberry farm. The couple built a barn (with a kit they bought from Sears), and then a writing cabin and a tennis court; Millay grew her own vegetables in a small garden. The couple later bought Ragged Island in Casco Bay, Maine, as a summer retreat. In 1943 Millay was awarded the Frost Medal for her lifetime contribution to American poetry, the sixth recipient of the honor, and the second woman. Boissevain died in 1949 of lung cancer and for the rest of her life she lived alone.
Death and Steepletop legacy
Millay died at her home on 19 October 1950. She had fallen down stairs and was found approximately eight hours after her death, her physician reporting the she had had a heart attack following a coronary occlusion. She was 58 years old.
Millay's sister Norma and her husband, painter Charles Ellis, moved to Steepletop following the death. In 1973, they established Millay Colony for the Arts on the seven acres (2.8 ha) around the house and barn, which they ran until Norma's death in 1986. At 17, the poet Mary Oliver visited Steepletop and became a close friend of Norma, eventually living there for seven years and helping to organise the late poet's papers. Mary Oliver would herself go on to become a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, much inspired by Millay and her work. In 2006, the state of New York paid $1.69 million to acquire of Steepletop, the land to be added to a nearby state forest preserve and the sale proceeds to be used to restore the farmhouse and turn it into a museum. Parts of the grounds of Steepletop, including a Poet's Walk that leads to her grave, are now open to the public.
She wrote five verse dramas early in her career, including Two Slatterns and a King and The Lamp and the Bell, a poem written for Vassar College about love between women. She was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera House to write a book for the score of an opera composed by Deems Taylor. The result, The King's Henchman, drew on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of Eadgar, King of Wessex, and was described as the most effectively and artistically wrought American opera ever to reach the stage. Within three weeks her publishers had run through four editions of the book.
Her pacifist verse drama Aria da Capo, a one-act play written for the Provincetown Players is the often anthologized. "Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare" (1922) is a homage to the Geometry of Euclid. "Renascence" and "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver" are considered her finest poems. On her death the New York Times described her as "an idol of the younger generation during the glorious early days of Greenwich Village [...} One of the greatest American poets of her time." Thomas Hardy said that America had two great attractions: the skyscraper and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
