Edna St Vincent Millay

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Standard Name: Millay, Edna St Vincent
Nickname: Vincent
Self-constructed Name: E. Vincent Millay
Married Name: Edna St Vincent Boissevain
Pseudonym: Nancy Boyd
ESVM was a charismatic American poet of the earlier twentieth century, who through her lifestyle came to stand for the sexually and economically liberated woman of the 1920s. She wrote particularly sonnets, love lyrics, and plays, as well as short stories, a libretto, and life-writing in the form of diaries and letters. From the beginning her work included passionate anti-war writing, which paved the way during the early years of the second world war for polemic against America's isolationist stance. Her later poems reach a deeper and more serious register, but by then her reputation was already in sharp decline. In 1937 John Crowe Ransom accused her of deficiency in masculinity. Though later commentators have generally been more tactful and less crass, a more recent poet, J. D. McClatchy , observes that this kind of venomous condescension has echoed down the years.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. “Introduction”. Selected Poems, edited by J. D. McClatchy, The Library of America, p. xvii - xxxiii.
xix

Connections

Connections Author name Sort descending Excerpt
Occupation Djuna Barnes
In the late 1910s DB became involved with the Provincetown Players , writing plays and also acting in their productions. In Provincetown, Massachusetts she came into contact with Eugene O'Neill and Edna St Vincent Millay
Friends, Associates Natalie Clifford Barney
By the 1920s the salon attracted an impressive array of prominent writers, artists, and intellectuals, including Paul Valéry , Colette , Jean Cocteau , Gabriele D'Annunzio , Rabindranath Tagore , Ernest Hemingway , F. Scott
Occupation Charles Baudelaire
Remembered largely for his poetry, whose early publication provoked a major crisis in censorship, CB also wrote important prose, especially criticism, and translated Edgar Allan Poe 's stories into French. As a literary and art...
Textual Features Carol Ann Duffy
Many poems here feature women answering back to canonical male voices: Liz Lochhead to Donne , Jenny Joseph to W. S. Gilbert , U. A. Fanthorpe to Walt Whitman , Wendy Cope to A. E. Housman
Reception Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Yellow Wall-Paper, Women and Economics, and Herland all feature prominently in North American curricula, and also attract ongoing scholarly inquiry.
Lane, Ann J. To Herland and Beyond. Pantheon Books.
7
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Reading Gilman in the Twenty-First Century”. The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, edited by Catherine J. Golden and Joanna Schneider Zangrando, Associated University Presses, pp. 209-20.
211
Judith A. Allen 's The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman...
Textual Features Germaine Greer
Reception Radclyffe Hall
The Well of Loneliness was also prosecuted for obscenity in the United States. There RH received support from writers including Ernest Hemingway , F. Scott Fitzgerald , Sinclair Lewis , Ellen Glasgow , Edna St Vincent Millay
Textual Production E. B. C. Jones
EBCJ published another novel, Helen & Felicia, dedicating it to her husband by his name and initials, with four lines from Edna St Vincent Millay .
Dated by the Bodleian Library acquisition stamp.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Intertextuality and Influence Sara Maitland
Ellie endures a great deal during the story. Her husband leaves her, wanting a divorce. A young friend dies of AIDS and the glass teardrop she has made for him gets broken. Her brother tries...
Intertextuality and Influence Adrienne Rich
First published in 1971 (Rich's collections often include writings issued previously), the essay When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision is described in 1988 by Elizabeth Meese as still inform[ing] much of the best work...
Textual Production Laura Riding
In the same year she and Graves jointly issued A Pamphlet Against Anthologies, which attacks the anthology culture, and several specific much-anthologized poems by such respected or popular names as W. B. Yeats ,...
Intertextuality and Influence Sappho
Elizabeth Moody engagingly converts Sappho into a contemporary in Sappho Burns her Books and Cultivates the Culinary Arts, 1798.
Jay, Peter, and Caroline Lewis. Sappho Through English Poetry. Anvil Press Poetry.
98
But many women poets accepted the notion of her rejected love for Phaon: Robinson
Textual Features Edith Sitwell
The English edition appeared the following year. Her choice for inclusion is, as usual, idiosyncratic. She begins well before Chaucer , with anonymous early religious poems in which may be heard, she writes, the creaking...
Textual Features G. B. Stern
A listing of books which GBS feels to be particularly her own includes Jane Austen , Edna St Vincent Millay , Dorothy Parker , and Rebecca West 's essays. But most of the women authors...
Reception Dorothy Wellesley
W. B. Yeats , then aged seventy, discovered DW 's writing in 1935 when he was ill in bed and was at work on The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. He was feeling disillusioned...

Timeline

1861: A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued...

Writing climate item

1861

A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued what seems to be the earliest version of a game called Authors, whose object was to collect sets of cards bearing the names of writers and the...

Texts

Millay, Edna St Vincent. A Few Figs from Thistles. F. Shay, 1920.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. Aria Da Capo. Harper, 1920.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. Collected Sonnets. Harper and Brothers, 1941.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. Conversation at Midnight. Harper and Brothers, 1937.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. Distressing Dialogues. Harper and Brothers, 1924.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. Fatal Interview: Sonnets. Harper and Brothers, 1931.
Baudelaire, Charles. Flowers of Evil. Translators Dillon, George and Edna St Vincent Millay, Harper, 1936.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. Huntsman, What Quarry?: Poems. Harper and Brothers, 1939.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. “Introduction”. Selected Poems, edited by J. D. McClatchy, The Library of America, 2003, p. xvii - xxxiii.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Editor Macdougall, Allan Ross, Harper, 1952.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. Make Bright the Arrows. Harper and Brothers, 1940.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. Mine the Harvest, a Collection of New Poems. Harper, 1954.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. Renascence, and Other Poems. Harper and Brothers, 1917.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. Second April. M. Kennerley, 1921.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. Selected Poems. Editor McClatchy, J. D., The Library of America, 2003.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver. Frank Shay, 1922.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. The Buck in the Snow, and Other Poems. Harper and Brothers, 1928.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. The Harp-Weaver, and Other Poems. Harper and Brothers, 1923.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. The King’s Henchman. Harper and Brothers, 1927.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. The Murder of Lidice. Harper and Brothers, 1942.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. The Princess Marries the Page. Harper and Brothers, 1932.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. There Are No Islands, Any More. Harper and Brothers, 1940.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. Two Slatterns and a King. Stewart Kidd Co., 1921.
Millay, Edna St Vincent. Wine from These Grapes. Harper and Brothers, 1934.