It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable-īut we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table, 7. We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. Her poetic restraint derives from her literary lineage as a practitioner of the poetess tradition, which emerged in eighteenth-century England, achieved immense popularity in the nineteenth-century United States, and persisted, as Millay demonstrates, within twentieth-century modernism. She taps into a poetic tradition that has always expressed emotional insight through conservative poetic conventions. Millay’s conservative forms communicate rather than confine a modernist affect and intuition.

The complications of a hunted human soul in these stirring days-the struggle for breath, for food and lodging, the pot-boilers, the flirtations, the teasing petty trials and interruptions-how could the poet in her survive all these, and put out fresh flowers of beauty? 4.Įdna St. 2.Ī draft of “Renascence,” from an undated letter to Gladys Nilesīeginning, before she was twenty and while still a little tomboy of the Maine coast, with Renascence, a poem of desperate faith, lithe as a faun in its naked search of the soul, the danger has been that life might lure her away from art. In sure, simple diction a school-girl seems to grasp the harmony of the universe, with a mystical understanding, with an omniscence that embraced all the joy, the pity, and the suffering of life. When in 1912 Edna Millay, then a girl of nineteen, submitted Renascence in a poetry contest, the judges, calmly over-looked it, after the manner of such judges, for a poem whose very title is unknown to day. Vincent Millay seemed an almost perfect example of this belief: her poetry was intimate rather than conventional, emotional rather than intellectual, realistic rather than philosophical, and inconstant to an extreme. Until she reached the age of thirty-five, Edna St. 1.ĪCCORDING to our convention, a woman feels rather than thinks, and is governed by emotion rather than intellect. Here, we invite you to take a closer look. Legend has it that the 20-year-old “Vincent,” as she called herself, recited her poem “Renascence” to a rapt audience that night, and the rest of her bohemian life was history. In 1912, she was famously discovered at a party at the Whitehall Inn in Camden, where her sister worked as a waitress.

Vincent Millay was born in 1892 in Maine.

Edna st vincent millay renascence