Edna St. Vincent Millay

Bio

(1892-1950) Poet, playwright. One of the most popular poets of her era, Edna St. Vincent Millay was admired as much for the bohemian freedom of her youthful life style as for her verse. During the early 1920s she lived in Greenwich Village (some of her New York addresses include 75 ½ Bedford Street, Greenwich Village (There is a plaque on the house), 139 Waverly and 25 Charlton Street), and wrote satiric sketches for “Vanity Fair” under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd. Among her friends were Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. “Renascence,” Millay’s first volume of poetry, appeared in 1917 and was praised for its freshness and vitality. It was followed by “A Few Figs from Thistles” (1920), “Second April” (1921), and “The Ballad of the Harp Weaver” (1922; Pulitzer Prize). She was a member of the Provincetown Players, a group that produced several of her verse dramas, including “Aria de Capo” (1920) and “Two Slatterns and a King” (1921). Among her later volumes are “Fatal Interview” (1931), a superb sonnet cycle; “Conversation at Midnight” (1937); and “Make Bright the Arrows” (1940). She also 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). After 1923, she lived out the rest of her life in Austerlitz, New York.