Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was a fierce, feminist poet, whose work and lifestyle both transcended gender barriers.
Every weekday, listeners explore the trials, tragedies, and triumphs of groundbreaking women throughout history who have dramatically shaped the world around us. In each 5 minute episode, we’ll dive into the story behind one woman listeners may or may not know -- but definitely should. These diverse women from across space and time are grouped into easily accessible and engaging monthly themes like Leading Ladies, Activists, STEMinists, Local Legends, and many more. Encyclopedia Womannica is hosted by WMN co-founder and award-winning journalist Jenny Kaplan. The bite-sized episodes pack painstakingly researched content into fun, entertaining, and addictive daily adventures.
Encyclopedia Womannica was created by Liz Kaplan and Jenny Kaplan, executive produced by Jenny Kaplan, and produced by Liz Smith, Cinthia Pimentel, Grace Lynch, Maddy Foley, and Brittany Martinez. Special thanks to Shira Atkins, Edie Allard, and Carmen Borca-Carrillo.
We are offering free ad space on Wonder Media Network shows to organizations working towards social justice. For more information, please email Jenny at jenny@wondermedianetwork.com.
Follow Wonder Media Network:
Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today’s storyteller was a fierce, feminist poet, whose work and lifestyle both transcended gender barriers. As the second ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, she became a voice for the rebellious, post-war generation.
Let’s talk about Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Edna St. Vincent Millay was born on February 22, 1892, in Rockland, Maine. Her mother, Cora, raised Edna and her two sisters largely on her own. Money was always tight, but Cora still fed her daughters on a steady diet of art, literature, music and poetry.
The oldest of the three girls, Edna -- who called herself ‘Vincent’ -- grew to be a theatrical teenager. She spent hours by the sea, learning the names of local flowers and medicinal herbs. She wrote prolifically, often winning prizes from a local children’s poetry magazine.
Here’s one such poem: “Oh world! I cannot hold thee close enough! Thy winds, thy wide gray skies!”
By the age of nineteen, Edna held a high school diploma, but lacked money for college. She helped manage the household for her sisters and mother in the coastal Maine town of Camden. She also kept writing.
Edna, encouraged by her mother, submitted one of her poems to a contest. Titled “Renascence,” it was made up of 107 rhyming couplets. The poem didn’t win, but it was included in a 1912 anthology called The Lyric Year. Many agreed Edna’s work was the standout piece. They also thought it had been written by a much older man -- Edna had submitted it under the name E. Vincent Millay.
Later that summer, Edna recited her now-celebrated poem Renascence at a local inn. In the audience was Caroline Dow, head of the YWCA National Training School in New York. Charmed by the young poet’s spirit and writing ability, she offered to help Edna get into college. Edna, thrilled, chose Vassar.
In 1913, Edna headed to New York, officially enrolling at Vassar. She participated in plays and pageants, some of her own creation, and loved studying the classics. She did not, however, love Vassar’s strict behavioral code.
“They trust us with everything but men,” she wrote in a letter to a friend.
After graduation, Edna moved to New York City’s Greenwich Village. It was 1917, and the lower Manhattan neighborhood had begun attracting artists, radicals and writers from across the world. Edna was all in on the bohemian lifestyle.
Joined by her sister, Norma, Edna, wrote poems for popular magazines like Vanity Fair, and began publishing collections of her own. She performed onstage with the Provincetown Players, and developed relationships with both men and women. To make ends meet, she also penned short stories and satire under the name Nancy Boyd. Edna would later describe her time in New York as, “very, very poor and very, very merry.”
In 1921, eager to give her poetry “new grass to feed on,” Edna set sail for Europe.
For two years, she served as a foreign correspondent for Vanity Fair, publishing two pieces a month.
When Edna returned to the U.S., in 1923, she experienced two major life changes. The first was becoming the second ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her poetry collection titled, “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver: A Few Figs from Thistles: Eight Sonnets in American Poetry.” The second was meeting her future husband, Eugen Boissevain. They married just a few months later.
In 1925, Edna answered a newspaper ad selling an abandoned berry farm in Austerlitz, New York, a few hours from Manhattan. She named the 700 acre homestead “Steepletop.”
Edna’s departure from Greenwich Village surprised her readers. She was, after all, a darling of New York society, the author of the iconic quatrain about living life as a true bohemian.
“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!”
But Edna was ready to settle down, and dedicate herself completely to writing.
She and Eugen turned Steepletop into a sort of writer’s paradise -- part working farm, part artist retreat. Edna wrote in a small shed in the middle of a blueberry field. The couple often hosted elaborate, days long parties, filled with drinking, skinny dipping, and theater performances.
The physical beauty of upstate New York proved an endless source of inspiration for Edna. Several of her poetry collections, including Steepletop: The Buck in the Snow and Fatal Interview, draw on the brutal lyricism of the natural world.
For over a decade, Edna and her husband Eugen lived a somewhat Idyllic life. At Steepletop, Edna wrote the libretto for an opera set in 10th century England, called The King’s Henchman. On its opening night in 1927, it earned 17 curtain calls. The New Yorker called it, “The greatest American opera so far.” She also published six poetry collections, several long poems, and translations of Baudelaire’s Fleur de Mal.
But in 1936, Edna was involved in a car accident. It left her with chronic arm and back pain, and a growing addiction to morphine that would haunt her for the rest of her life.
In 1940, as World War II approached, Edna became deeply anti-pacifist, publishing a hastily-written book of propaganda poems. Even her most loyal fans were alienated.
Over the next few years, a series of deaths would push her towards the edge. After the passing of her sister, Kathleen, her editor Gene Saxton, and her close friend Arthur Ficke, she was admitted to the hospital for mental and emotional exhaustion. But the biggest blow was yet to come.
In 1949, Edna’s husband, Eugen, was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died unexpectedly following surgery in Boston.
Edna was devastated. She retreated to Steepletop, refusing to see guests and unplugging her phone. She relied on the postmistress to pay her bills, and her handyman to keep up the property.
Life without her partner was painful and lonely, but after a few months of mourning, Edna began to fill her notebooks with writing again. She was commissioned for a Thanksgiving poem by the Saturday Evening Post, and had begun work on a new poetry collection.
Edna was, after all, a seemingly unstoppable creative force. Despite a childhood of poverty and lifelong health problems, she’d become the poetic voice of a generation, subverting gender norms and reveling in the mundane, the bittersweet, and the sensual. In penning romantic works from the perspective of women, she’d made female sexuality, for the first time, a viable literary topic.
But Edna’s comeback was brief. On October 18, 1950, while home alone, she seemingly slipped and fell down a flight of stairs. She was 58 years old.
Her obituary read, “Critics agreed, that Greenwich Village and Vassar, plus a gypsy childhood on the rocky coast of Maine, produced one of the greatest American poets of her time.”
All month, we’re talking about storytellers.
For more on why we’re doing what we’re doing, check out our newsletter Womannica Weekly.
Follow us on facebook and instagram @encyclopediawomannica.
Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator.
As always, we’ll be taking a break for the weekend. Talk to you on Monday!