Edna St. Vincent Millay
From Philosopedia
Millay, Edna St. Vincent (22 Feb 1892 - 19 Octobober 1950)
Millay is sometimes remembered as the American poet who was known for the bohemian freedom of her life style, the one who wrote
- 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.
To which Dorothy Parker respectfully remarked,
- We all wandered in after Miss Millay. We were all being dashing and gallant, declaring that we weren’t virgins, whether we were or not. Beautiful as she was, Miss Millay did a great deal of harm with her double-burning candles . . . made poetry seem so easy that we could all do it. But, of course, we couldn’t.
Although the poem's above wording is identical to what was published in A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), individuals who say she wrote it at Romany Marie's café in Greenwich Village, claim the first line was the more sexual "I burn my candle at both sends. . . ."
Millay was born in Maine and was given her middle name to honor a New York City site, Greenwich Village’s St. Vincent Hospital, in which one of her relatives - an uncle - had once been taken and had recovered. In 1892, the uncle had accidentally been locked in the hold of a ship for several days without food or water.
She graduated from Vassar College (and had tried to commit suicide there by jumping from her dormitory window).
Millay moved to Greenwich Village in the 1920s (to “the smallest house in New York City,” 9 1/2’ wide, at 75 1/2 Bedford Street, which at various times was inhabited also by matinee idol John Barrymore, film actor Cary Grant, and composer-critic Deems Taylor).
According to Edmund Wilson, his first sexual experience had been with Millay, who was not interested in repeating the episode.
In the Village she became associated with the Provincetown Players, writing one-act satirical fantasies for them such as Two Slatterns and a King (1921). A Few Figs from Thistles (1920) established her as a reckless, romantic, cynical, “naughty” New Woman, and her impact became great upon writers of her time.
In 1923, Millay married Eugene Jan Boissevain, a Dutch coffee importer, and moved to “Steepletop,” a farm near Austerlitz, New York. That same year, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Harp-Weaver and Other Poems.
Critics found her work contained a disillusioned bitterness and remarked about her technical ability, particularly in her sonnets. Millay wrote the libretto for Deems Taylor’s opera, The King’s Henchman (1927) and, with George Dillon, she translated Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil (1936).
Jennifer S. Wilson of the University of Minnesota relates that at a cocktail party Millay once discussed her recurrent headaches with a psychologist who asked her about her attraction to women. “Oh, you mean I’m homosexual!” Millay responded. “Of course I am, and heterosexual too, but what’s that got to do with my headache?”
Although, like many poets, she used the word “God,” she did not appear to mean it in an orthodox sense. In her “Conversation at Midnight,” Millay wrote,
- There is no God. But it does not matter. Man is enough.
In 1949, her husband died, and Millay died less than a year later of heart failure.
