who were experimenting with intellectual poetry
in free verse; they found Millay to be a sentimental
woman writer lacking depth. ThoughMine the
Harvest, her last collection, was praised after her
death, her poetry was neglected until the 1990s,
when her reputation was revived by feminist crit-
ics. ‘‘An Ancient Gesture’’ can also be found in a
current edition ofCollected Poems: Edna St. Vin-
cent Millay(1981) or inSelected Poems: Edna
St. Vincent Millay(1991).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHYEdna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland,
Maine, on February 22, 1892, the eldest daughter
of Cora Buzzell and Henry Tolman Millay. She
was given her middle name in honor of St. Vin-
cent’s Hospital, in New York City, where her
uncle’s life had been miraculously saved. Henry
Millay was a salesman and a gambler. Cora, who
was a free spirit and had literary ambitions herself,
had three daughters in four years, with Norma
and Kathleen following Edna. She taught the
girls poetry and music when they were small.
Cora finally sent Henry away when he could not
support them, then moved to Rockport, Maine,
and found work as a practical nurse, raising the
children alone. Cora was absent a lot, and the girls
were unusually independent, writing poems and
stories and putting on plays. They grew up on the
wild Maine coast, a landscape that appears often
in Millay’s poetry. The Millay girls were rebellious
and uninhibited under their mother’s liberal guid-
ance and naturally became artists and free women
of the Jazz Age.
When Millay attended high school in Cam-
den, Maine, her talent began to shine. She was
editor of the school magazine and appeared in
plays. Inheriting her mother’s dreams of a literary
career, she began to win prizes for poems and
essays, such as fromSt. Nicholasmagazine, for
children’s writing. The family was too poor for
the girls to attend college, but Millay submitted
her most famous poem, ‘‘Renascence,’’ to a con-
test in 1911 when she was nineteen; she was
assured by the editor of the book to result,The
Lyric Year(1912), that she would win, but she
won fourth place instead. The publicity sur-
rounding the volume of poems was in her favor
regardless, since most critics decided she had
deserved to win.
The pretty red-haired young poet was assisted
by a philanthropist, Caroline Dow, to attend Vas-
sar College, then a women’s school, where Millay
became popular, writing and acting in plays and
engaging in numerous affairs, fancying herself a
Sappho (the storied ancient Greek poet from Les-
bos). In the year of her graduation, 1917, her first
volume of poetry,Renascence, and Other Poems,
was published, making her instantly famous. She
moved to Greenwich Village and lived the life of
an avant-garde artist in the 1920s, becoming an
actress with the Provincetown Players and having
affairs with other artists and radical intellectuals.
To support herself she also wrote fiction for mag-
azines under her great-grandmother’s name, Nancy
Boyd. In 1919 she wrote, directed, and acted in her
own play,Aria da Capo, an antiwar piece that won
acclaim.
In 1920, Millay publishedAFewFigsfrom
Thistles, full of flippant poems about free love,
making her the spokeswoman of a rebellious
younger generation. In 1921,Second April,amore
sober collection of lyricpoems, appeared. FromEdna St. Vincent Millay(The Library of Congress)
An Ancient Gesture