Savage Beauty
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) won the Pulitzer Poetry Prize in 1923 and was voted one of the ten most famous women in America in 1938. "Renascence", one of her most well-known poems, was begun when she was 19 years old and brought immediate attention to her talent.
Edna was the oldest of the three daughters born to Cora and Henry Millay. But after Cora and Henry were divorced, Cora worked away from home most of the time as a nurse, and the girls had to take care of themselves. Edna was in charge but replaced her mother with a personal diary. Cora and her daughters were all gifted, both in music and writing, and each went on to have some written material published.
Because of her poetry writing talent, Edna was sponsored to attend Vassar College. But she wasn't an ideal student, and she got into trouble enough times that the faculty tried to keep her from the graduation ceremony. After college she tried to concentrate on writing both poetry and plays, as well as be involved in anti-war movements. That's where she met Floyd Dell, her first lover, who heard her wake up one morning and predict, "I shall have many lovers."
An accurate prediction! For throughout her life, she was "...drawn to relationships that were doomed to fail," with several women and many men. And this didn't change after she married Eugen Boissevain, who had agreed to an open marriage. During the years she spent in Paris while he stayed at their Steepletop home in New York, she had several lovers, but lived mainly with George Dillon, a poet many years younger than she, whom Edna had originally met in Chicago.
But Eugen stayed with her, and when she returned to America, he escorted her on most of her reading tours across the country. The captivating voice she used when reciting her poems enchanted most audiences and she became known as the "poet-girl" of American writing. At one college, she recited poetry along with Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg. Then in 1932, she began a nationwide poetry reading program on radio. Over these years, five different colleges awarded her with honorary degrees.
In 1927, Millay joined Deems Taylor in the production of "The King's Henchman", an opera that became a hit in New York. But it was her popularity of her poetic sonnets that brought her wealth during the next two decades. During WW II, she wrote propaganda poems to help the war effort. But her continual health problems, mostly caused by morphine and alcohol, slowed down her writing. She died from a fall in 1950.
Nancy Milford's research for this biography was a big undertaking.
Norma, Edna's younger sister, made much of this possible while we she was
alive, so SAVAGE BEAUTY is filled with many letters which had been saved,
as well as poems. The ending, however, is rather abrupt, and whatever
funeral, memorial service, or honors were bestowed on Edna St. Vincent
Millay are never mentioned.. The book was published in 2001.