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!

Another simple, gemlike poem to which there is really nothing for me to add. Millay is high up on my list of poets whom I feel deserve to be better known - her poetry is wonderfully lyrical, often moving and always beautiful.

Biographical Notes

Edna St. Vincent Millay, born in 1892 in Maine, grew to become one of the premier twentieth-century lyric poets. She was also an accomplished playwright and speaker who often toured giving readings of her poetry. All of that was in her public life, but her private life was equally interesting. An unconventional childhood led into an unconventional adulthood. She was an acknowledged bisexual who carried on many affairs with women, an affection for which is sometimes evident in her poems and plays. She did marry, but even that part of her life was somewhat unusual, with the marriage being quite open, and extramarital affairs, tho not documented, quite probable.

Millay enjoyed her free-spirited childhood and adolescence and the creativity that it inspired. At the age of twenty, she entered her poem “Renascence” into a poetry contest for the The Lyric Year, a contest from which 100 poems were to be chosen to be published. It was, at first, overlooked as being too simplistic, However, one of the judges took a second look at it and the poem, now one of her most well known, ended up winning fourth place. It was that poem which really started her on her literary career, beginning with a scholarship to the then all female college of Vassar.

Millay kept up her writing, both poetic and dramatic while at Vassar. It was during this time that she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her book The Harp-Weaver and other Poems.

– excerpted from the ‘Renascence’ website

http://members.aol.com/MillayGirl/millay.htm#BIOGRAPHY

Criticism

Undoubtedly some of the furor aroused by her earlier poems was due to the period of their appearance; in those first volumes Millay was the voice of rebellious “flaming youth, “ of the young people who were bent on gathering “figs from thistles” and burning their candles at both ends, of the girls who claimed for themselves the free standards of their brothers. With the exception of Elinor Wylie in her last great series, no woman since Elizabeth Barrett Browning, it has been argued, excels her in that (Sonnet) form. Hildegarde Flanner spoke of “the sense of freshness and transparent revelation that early lyrics conveyed,” of “the infusion of personal energy and glow into the traditions of lyric poetry, and deceptively artless ability to set down the naked fact un-fortified.” She brought a new sense of poetry as song to a generation. In any poll of literate (not professional) opinion, it is stated that she would have almost certainly have been named first among the contemporary poets of America. The skill with which she employed the sonnet, developed over a number of years, perhaps most evident in “Epitaph for the Race of Man” (1928) and Fatal Interview (1931), can be explained in large part by the tension created between form and content: “I will put Chaos in fourteen lines,” she said in Mine the Harvest. Moreover, it has become clear that she helped to free the poetry of American women from thematic inhibitions.

Following her successes in the 1920’s and early 1930’s, Millay’s poetry gradually suffered a critical and popular decline. Unfortunately, her real poetic achievements were overshadowed by her image as the free (but “naughty”) woman of the 1920’s. During the last two decades of her life, Millay was almost ignored critically, although her Collected Sonnets appeared in 1941 and Collected Lyrics in 1943. Since the late 1960’s, however, there has been a renewed interest in Millay’s works, with more sympathetic critical evaluation.

– From http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/6865/millaybio.html

Incidentally, if you would like to read more of her work, there are a number of Millay pages on the net, of which my favourite is http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/6865/millay.html

— Martin