Millay Birthday

It’s the birthday of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892) (books by this author), considered one of the finest American poets of her time. One of her best-known poems, “First Fig,” became emblematic for certain wild-hearted young people during the Jazz Age. Millay liked to say she was born “between the mountains and the sea” in Rockland, Maine. She and her two sisters were raised solely by their mother, who tried to instill in them a sense of independence and art. Millay longed to be a pianist, but her teacher said her hands were too small, so she focused on poetry instead. She was a tomboy; her family called her “Vincent.”

When Millay was 19, her mother saw a poetry contest in a magazine called The Lyric Year and encouraged Millay to enter. Her poem, “Renascence,” came in fourth, though everybody thought she should have won, including the second-prize winner, who offered her his $250 prize. She found a champion, though, in arts patron Caroline Dow, who saw such promise in Millay that she offered to pay her tuition at Vassar College. Millay loved college life, even though she was older than most of the other women. She wore men’s clothes, wrote and starred in a play called The Princess Marries the Page, and delighted in campus hijinks. Once, when she sent in a sick excuse to a class, the teacher stopped her later in the hallway and said, “Vincent, you sent in a sick excuse at nine o’clock this morning and at ten o’clock I happened to look out the window of my office and you were trying to kick out the light in the chandelier on top of the Taylor Hall arch, which seemed a rather lively exercise for someone so taken with illness.” Millay responded, “Prexy, at the moment of your class, I was in pain with a poem.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay headed to Greenwich Village after graduation, just in time for the Jazz Age. She spoke six languages, had affairs with men and women, and wrote for Vanity Fair magazine. One of her friends described her as “a frivolous young woman, with a brand-new pair of dancing slippers and a mouth like a valentine.” She made friends with fellow writers E.E. Cummings and Eugene O’Neill and wrote to a friend, “People fall in love with me and annoy me and distress me and flatter me and excite me.”

She lived in an attic apartment at 75 ½ Bedford Street that was nine feet long and six feet wide. It was the narrowest house in New York City and is today known as “The Millay House.”

Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (1923) for her book, The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver. Her other books include Renascence and Other Poems (1912), Fatal Interview (1931), and Collected Sonnets (1941).

After an affair with a French violinist didn’t end well, she married and bought a big house she called “Steepletop” in Austerlitz, New York. She built a cabin where she could write and cultivated the gardens. Steepletop had a spring-fed pool and Millay enjoyed swimming in the nude. She gave readings all over the country.

Edna St. Vincent Millay died in (1950). Her husband had passed away, and she’d drifted into alcoholism and ill health. She was found at the foot of the stairway at Steepletop. After she died, her sister turned Steepletop into the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Millay 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!”