Millay's Passionate Life

...She comes across as a kind of creepy Whatever Happened to Baby Jane...

...It will always give the lie to any too respectful biography...

...What she leaves out in this allegory is that Norma and Kathleen were also sacrificed so that Millay might thrive...

...Inspired by the opportunity the contest offered, she joyfully finished the lyric, entitled "Renasance," and sent it off...

...For the first time, too, the sad story of Kathleen is told...

...We don't even learn much about such other aspects of her career as acting with the Provincetown Playhouse...

...Regrettably her later verse has been dismissed by most critics and remains largely unread...

...Consequently, Milford's concentration on the life seems appropriate...

...As ambitious as her oldest sibling, she wrote novels and poetry that sounded too much like Edna's work and reached print because of the family name...

...Millay was a phenomenally successful writer, a consummate crafter of verse who sustained a bond with her audience for decades...

...It will not last the night...

...Bogan's judgment was on target...

...cats die...

...Vincent Millay (Random House, 527 pp., $29.95), due to reach bookstores the first week in September...

...Millay's success brought her into contact with two other leading lyricists of the day, Sara Teasdale and Elinor Wylie...

...Her verse made a direct emotional appeal to audiences...

...He had been her protector and buffer against all hardships, the one to whom she always returned after her flings...

...Absent, too, is any detailed information on her political involvements, although this caused the FBI to keep a file on her and changed the way she wrote verse...

...For the next two decades, the three were leading lights of the poetry world...

...Unfortunately, Cora's mother was killed in a carriage accident while still young, and her eldest child felt she had brought ruin on the family by encouraging her to break up her marriage...

...Did we really need the anecdote from a not very friendly witness of a drunken, middle-aged Millay picking up a barman to prove her desirability...

...Previous works on Millay have ventured educated guesses about the extent of the poet's bisexuality or the subject of her sonnet sequence, "Fatal Interview...

...In Milford's account, alas, we hear more about compulsive sexuality and forms of escapism than about the exploration of emotion that makes Millay's poetry compelling...

...You fetch a shoe-box, but it's much too small because she won ? curl up now: Soyoufinda bigger box, and bury her in theyard, andweep...

...As J. D. McClatchy noted recently, "The passionate heart was her landscape, and she explored it daringly...

...But as Modernism began to replace Romanticism, critics decried Millay's lack of intellectual content and depth...

...We also know unequivocally that she is talking about the young poet George Dillon in the sonnet sequence "Fatal Interview," and that his unsatisfactory affair with Millay (he was probably homosexual) ended in the destruction of his own creative work...

...Milford is somewhat better at showing how Millay became a prisoner of her initial success...

...Gradually, she became paranoid and claimed her initial efforts had been stolen by Edna to forge her success...

...Kathleen sponged off, and sometimes tried to blackmail, her sisters and their husbands...

...but it will also be there to make the casualties of her life seem unimportant...

...But the surviving Millay sister, Norma, guarded the poet's manuscripts and family papers like a dragon, intent on preserving control over whatever secrets might be revealed...

...They subscribed to a children's magazine, St...

...So at the height of her powers this most universally comprehended of poets suddenly found herself misunderstood and vilified...

...Vincent Millay's poetry and let her communicate directly once again...

...The aura of guilt present in some of Millay's more poignant lyrics can now be seen to stem from her problematic relations with both Cora and Kathleen...

...Although Milford does not directly say so, the reader may infer that it could never have actually been published before this particular dragon died...

...The New Critics had their long knives out, and did not hesitate to use them...

...She is not remembered for whom she married or inspired, but for her own work...

...After herparents divorced, Cora and her mother made a living by weaving hairpieces on a harplike instrument for women seeking to augment their natural "crowning beauty...

...Her poetry is not the work of a being for whom life could ever have been easy or gone along at a comfortable level...

...She seemed able to sustain love only when the object was unavailable, and Milford effectively traces that trait to having developed this from her almost incestuous relationship with Cora, whom Millay credited with making her a writer...

...Instead of discussing craftsmanship and the literary climate, she concentrates on "Bohemianism"— affairs with celebrities and younger men, posing for pornographic photos, drinking and drug-taking...

...Romanticized stories of Millay's origins have been replaced by the truth...

...As long as she lived, Millay thought of her mother with a mixture of romantic adulation and half-suppressed resentment for leaving her children so much...

...In 1952, three years after Millay's death, Edmund Wilson wrote Norma: "I don't think you ought to try—as people's families so often do—to suppress the tragic aspects [of Millay's existence] because they might be painful or shocking to Edna's more conventional admirers...

...It also resulted in a patron coming forward who sent her to Vassar...

...Ironically, it turned out that Cora was competing in the contest as well...

...The first thing one has to say about Savage Beauty is that it has been tailored for the bestseller lists...

...character...

...Her gamine beauty, deep musical voice, passionate lyrics, and wild life combined to make her bewitching...

...Until recently, academics continued to speak scornfully of the tradition of "poetesses"— with Millay as exhibit A. But Women's Studies programs and changing poetic tastes have revived interest in the song-like lyric and its practitioners...

...Still, Milford has certainly turned up some shocking new material...

...Yet the work she was producing anticipated poets like Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath by three decades...

...As a young girl, Cora Buzzell Millay had persuaded her own mother to leave her father and go off with a lover...

...In describing her end, Milford tacitly leaves open the possibility that the fall might have been deliberate...

...Norma's portrait, meanwhile, is done in an off-putting Hollywood style...

...Millay had recently lost her mother, her longtime muse, and awakened to political concerns...

...Earlier this year Random House Audiobooks put out The Voice of the Poet, containing readings by Millay, Louise Bogan, Gertrude Stein, H. D., and Muriel Rukeyser...

...Milford's earlier subject, the emotionally frail Zelda Fitzgerald, may have possessed writing talent, but no matter whom she married she would never have had the psychic resources to persevere...

...One can only hope that after Savage Beauty, readers will turn to the fresh sound of Edna St...

...It also turns out that she did not die of a heart attack at 59, as earlier sources have stated, but broke her neck falling down stairs...

...Wine From These Grapes, Louise Bogan wrote: "Edna Millay at last gives evidence that she recognizes and is prepared to meet the task of becoming a mature and self-sufficing woman and artist...

...They lie on the floor and lash their tails...

...The family was dirt poor and the three girls virtually raised themselves, because Cora hired herself out as a nurse to support them and was often gone for months...

...I will permit my memory to recall/ The vision of you," had lived her own lines...

...Reviewing her 1931 volume...

...The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, her books were as popular as best-selling novels...

...An example is her memorial for Cora, "Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies," which describes how...

...or "Only until this cigarette is ended...

...That is probably fortuitous...

...No one will accuse Milford of having suppressed the "tragic" aspects of her subject, but one notes Wilson did not say sordid...

...This was the source of Edna's haunting poem, "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver...

...Milford believes the key to understanding Millay lies in her relationship with her mother...

...She read to packed halls, where men and women alike swooned over her...

...Years later Millay recalled that when she was seven, "my father went when my mother told him to go & not come back...

...But her fans resisted her desire to move on...

...we lose sight of the poet praised by critics from Allen Tate to Edmund Wilson...

...Yeats' role in building up the reputations of Teasdale and Wylie, for instance, helps explain why Millay had a major impact from her first adult publication...

...On the contrary, it may play into the hands of those who have always dismissed her as a sensation-monger, milking superficial emotions...

...Nonetheless, it is disappointing to be fobbed off by a "celebrity bio" of a poet who really needs a fresh critical look...

...Millay could be wonderfully close and generous to both friends and strangers...

...You did not have to learn to read Millay in a college classroom—you could pick up one of her books and be swept away, instantly...

...she was often compared with Keats and even Shakespeare...

...Barely a year had gone by since the death of her older husband, Eugen Boissevain, and she was still mourning...

...Feeling trapped by the parochial life of her Maine village, she had intermittently been working on a wildly original poem about what it is like to be confined in a world too small for one's dreams...

...Whatever Savage Beauty may do to revive interest in Millay, it will do little to encourage a serious critical reappraisal of her work...

...Simultaneously, the Modern Library will issue a volume of Millay's selected poems, edited by Milford...

...Though Millay did not win, her entry caused such a stir that it launched her career...

...In 1912, when Millay was 20, Cora persuaded her to enter a poetry contest...

...Nevertheless, many loyal fans continued to value the intimacy of her poetry, and her matchless ability to translate feelings into words...

...Yet this was not only by far the most constant emotional relationship in her life, but she subsequently transferred some of these ambivalent feelings onto her long suffering husband...

...Now, Milford has finished Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St...

...But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends— It gives a lovely light...

...As they mature, they begin to grow out of themselves," she added, "and they feel concern for others...

...Then there was her dashing personality...

...Her morphine addiction, though, went unnoticed...

...Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot could not forget that a mere decade ago their verse had been mocked when a new volume by Millay sold 50,000 copies...

...She thus reduces her subject to a Madonna-like exhibitionist with an unfailing instinct for self-promotion...

...She has crossed the line, made the break, passed into regions of cold and larger air...

...And their reticent far is suddenly all in motion With fleas that one never knew were there, Polished and brown, knowing all there is to know, Trekking off into the living world...

...Lyric poets who continue to write lyric poetry are likely to go into a dry rot andjust write the same thing over again...

...she hated standing still...

...In addition, despite Milford's not seeming to notice, the style of poetry was under alteration by the 1930s...

...Her petite, lithe body gave her a youthful appearance into her 40s, earning her the soubriquet, "the girl poet...

...When lyric poetry—especially the songlike lyric—is fashionable, women invariably play an influential role on the literary scene...

...Alcoholism, drug cocktails and depression, however, had brought Millay to the point where she may not have been entirely conscious of what she was doing that night...

...or "I shall forget you presently, my dear,/ So make the most of this, your little day," or "Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow...

...Young poets, she would observe, tend to be primarily preoccupied with their own lives and psyches...

...In "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver," she speaks of a mother who sacrifices herself to give her one son the chance of a successful, happy life...

...Here the weakness of Milford's approach becomes glaringly apparent...

...Or maybe she said he might come back if he would do better—but who ever does better...

...Millay never ceased developing as an artist...

...The heavily allusive free verse of Modernism was replacing those incantatory lyrics favored by Yeats and his followers in popular and critical tastes...

...They had three girls: Edna—always called Vincent by family and close friends—Norma and Kathleen...

...Scant information is provided about the literary preferences or the influential writers of the time...

...In view of Millay's continuing popularity among a significant number of devotees, and considering her colorful existence, it is remarkable that 51 years have passed without an authoritative biography...

...As Stephen Dedalus said so eloquently in Ulysses, in some poor families one child may climb to success over the dashed hopes of the other siblings...

...In 1972, Nancy Milford, biographer of Zelda Fitzgerald, finally talked Norma Millay into authorizing her to write the book...

...But you won't learn that from Milford...

...Nicholas, where Millay first published and learned her craft...

...Nevertheless, she repeated the pattern, marrying a charming yet weak man...

...Like many child prodigies, she worried that precocious brilliance might lead to an unexceptional adulthood...

...You could tell that the woman who wrote "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,/1 have forgotten...

...She also knew how to withdraw both physically and emotionally, as her lovers found to their cost...

...A LOT IN Savage Beauty will be useful to future scholars...

...Novelistic in style, light on literary observations, it does a substantially better job of pinning down the facts of the poet's life than of explaining why she was once taken seriously as a writer...

...Cora, who had literary ambitions, taught her daughters to love poetry at an early age...

...Long after she tired of the sassy insouciance of her early work, crowds at readings clamored for those pieces in preference to "Justice Denied in Massachusetts"—on the Sacco-Vanzetti execution —or her thoughtful later verse...

...And who could resist the Jazz Age bravado of My candle burns at both ends...

...The time is certainly ripe for a serious reappraisal of the author of Renascence, A Few Figs from Thistles, the oneact play Aria Da Capo, and all the other books that contributed to Millay's being widely read and discussed...

...Her literary reputation suffered a decline...