Edna Millay
She Ranks Sixth or Seventh Among Contemporary Versifiers
Having won the Pulitzer Poetry Prize, having changed publishers and been married during the Spring and Summer as well as having been operated upon for appendicitis, Edna St. Vincent Millay doubtless now enjoys her convalescence with something like complacency. I cannot, somehow, think of her as complacent, however. This delicate, elfish woman is as restless, as full of vitality as a wheat field on a windy day.
Edna Millay was graduated from Vassar. Stories of her undergraduate days are not free from anecdotes of temperament displayed. She was notably successful, then, however, with her verses, and her prize-winning poem, Renascence, was heralded by the critics as an extraordinary performance for one so young. From college she migrated to Greenwich Village. The contrast between Washington Square and her home town of Rockland, Me., was great; but it did not disconcert her. She soon became a legend. Her poetry was widely read, her charms widely heralded. She was a poet of renown and even more brilliant as a personality. Tiring soon, however, of the Bohemian life of the Village she went to Europe with her mother. There she stayed, as a part of the American colony in Paris; then, for a time, in England. This Spring she again sought America. When one saw her, she seemed frailer than ever. It was rumored that she was ill. She left town and sought the wilds of Croton-on-Hudson. Visitors to the colony there did not see her. She remained in seclusion. Then, with no warning whatever, this writer of passionate, free, gayly cynical love poetry, abandoned Croton for the hospital and was at the same time married to Eugene Boissevain, a young importer of Dutch extraction who plays an excellent game of tennis, dances gracefully and seems to appreciate the arts. What effect this marriage will have upon the poetry of Miss Millay is a question for the psychologists to ponder and time to answer.
Where does this brilliant young poetess rank among our present-day versifiers? Her lyrics are more moving to me than those of Sara Teasdale or Elinor Wylie; but on the other hand one can think of no woman poet who has quite achieved the breath and flashing brilliance of Amy Lowell. Miss Millay's is a different gift. I should be inclined to rank her second, then, in importance among our women poets, and remembering Lindsay, Frost and Robinson, sixth or seventh among our contemporary versifiers. J.F.
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