Cannily brilliant, unconventionally beautiful, and ruthlessly committed to the perfection of her art and craft, U.S. poet and dramatist Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) gave the Jazz Age its lyric voice. If F. Scott Fitzgerald was the definitive prose chronicler of that era, then the five-foot-nuthin' flame-haired bisexual dynamo set their generation's pace, showing and telling her peers "what to say about how they felt," and doing it with "wit, style, and passion."
So writes authorised biographer Nancy Milford in Savage Beauty , the exquisite rendering of the once ubiquitous and universally beloved turn-of-the-century celebrity (its author spent 20-plus years polishing). Milford's previous work, Zelda (1970), sold more than 1.4 million copies in five editions and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer and National Book Awards. Now, with the release of Savage Beauty - timed to coincide with a fresh collection of Millay's finest edited by Milford (The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay) — this unflinchingly astute and compulsively readable portrait looks poised to become one of the season's hottest sellers, especially since Milford delivers the uncut dope on a life that was, by all accounts, cursed and blessed in equal measure.
The eldest of three daughters raised in Camden, Maine by ambitious single-mother Cora, Vincent (as her close-knit family called her) almost effortlessly rose through the ranks of writers to become the Jazz Babies' guiding light on passionate liberation or the liberation of the passions. She smoked and drank, wore the latest fashions and, with those sonorous and sensuous lines of her meticulously crafted poems and sonnets earning raves and mega-royalties right across the board, the delicate and diminutive media darling spoke her mind. Look no further than "First Fig," first published in Poetry in 1918: "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."
Millay was a graduate of Vassar who later led a high-flying boho life in New York's Greenwich Village (where her circle of friends and colleagues included poets Bliss Carman, George Dillon, Witter Bynner, and Elinor Wylie as well as composer Deems Taylor, influential publisher Eugene Saxton, and author-critic Edmund Wilson — whose marriage proposal, incidentally, Millay declined).
Generous in his praise of Millay, Wilson called her "one of the only poets writing in English in our time who has attained anything like the status of great literary figures." Remarking upon the girlish delight the phenomenally successful writer took in becoming famous (after Vanity Fair featured her pic and a trio of her poems), Wilson additionally noted there was "something of awful drama about everything one did with Edna . . .. In all this, she was not egotistic in any boring or ridiculous or oppressive way, because it was not the personal, but the impersonal Edna Millay — that is, the poet — that preoccupied her so incessantly."
When it came to her major preoccupation, Millay eloquently expressed her view that gender ought not affect the appraisal of poetry: "A poet is a poet. The critics should estimate her work as such. Instead they compare her poetry with that of men poets, then say condescendingly, 'This is pretty good for a woman poet.' What I want to know is, is it a good or a bad sonnet. That is all as a poet that I am interested in."
In 1923, the year she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize (for The Harp Weaver), Millay entered into an "open marriage" with Dutch importer and self-styled feminist Eugen Boissevain. The philandering pair of "bachelors" remained devoted to each other (through bouts of luxury, adultery, penury, alcoholism, and narcotic addiction) for the next 26 years (until Boissevain's death in 1949).
Although she "was voted one of the ten most famous women in America" in 1938, few contemporary readers recognise Millay's greatest pieces — "Renascence," "The Suicide," "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed," "Three Songs of Shattering," and "Assault" — while even fewer appreciate her impact upon the social fabric and political issues of the day. Not only did Millay publicly condemn the execution of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, she also penned the anti-war verse play Aria da Capo before teaming up with Deems to create the libretto for what is now considered the first successful American opera, The King's Henchman. An unqualified hit, the work earned its author and composer 17 curtain calls when it was given its premiere at the Met in 1927.
It is commonly held that Millay, the possessor of a thrillingly seductive voice and a tremendous amount of charisma, charm, and drive, died of heart failure (or, more accurately, a broken heart). Savage Beauty concludes at exactly the moment the 58-year-old meets her Maker, revealing that the doctor who pronounced Millay dead "found her at the foot of the stairway from which she had apparently fallen . . .."
According to the author of what is destined to become the last and best word on Millay's life and work, the poet's "head was resting on some magazines and letters on the landing, where there was a mark of blood and one notebook with the pencilled draft of a poem. She had traced a ring around the last three lines: 'I will control myself, or go inside. / I will not flaw perfection with my grief. / Handsome, this day: no matter who has died.'"
Judith Fitzgerald Adagios Quartet Leonard Cohen: Master of Song (Dundurn Press, Fall 2008).
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