Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1892–1950)

Although she spent only a few years in the New York City community known as Greenwich Village, Edna St. Vincent Millay will always be associated with the unconventional lifestyle and artistic experimentation characteristic of Greenwich Village during the 1920s. An enormously popular poet of her day, Millay embodied the rebellious, questing spirit that emerged in the aftermath of World War I.

Millay was born in Rockford, Maine, and began writing poetry at an early age. "Renascence," the first of her poems to attract public attention, was written when she was still in high school and appeared in a literary anthology when she was only 20.

After graduating from Vassar College in 1917, Millay moved to Greenwich Village and quickly became part of the New York City artistic scene. While supporting herself by working as an actress and a playwright, she published a number of short stories and several collections of poetry, including Renascence and Other Poems (1917), A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), and Second April (1921). Her collection, The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1923), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1923, Millay married Eugen Boissevain and moved to a farm in upstate New York where she spent the rest of her life. Although she continued to write poetry, she began turning away from writing the intensely personal lyric poems that had made her famous. Instead, deeply disturbed by the rise of fascism in Europe and the resulting war, she started focusing on current events in her poetry.

In her earlier poetry, which is generally regarded as her best, Millay displayed an ability to express the primary concerns of her time in a readily accessible, lyrical style. Like the work of other modern writers, her poetry expressed a rebellious attitude and explored the uncertainty and disillusionment of modern life. Yet her work remained linked to the past through her use of traditional verse forms and poetic devices.

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