74 THENEWYORKER,M AY16, 2022
BOOKS
BURNED OUT
How fame fed on Edna St. Vincent Millay.
BY MAGGIE DOHERTY
ILLUSTRATION BY LILY SNOWDEN-FINE
I
t was at a party in Greenwich Vil-
lage, in the spring of 1920, that the
critic Edmund Wilson first encoun-
tered Edna St. Vincent Millay in the
flesh. Wilson, a well-bred graduate of
Princeton, was a fan of the twenty-eight-
year-old poet’s work—he’d taken to re-
citing one of her sonnets in the shower—
but he was, in her physical presence,
overcome. Years later, Wilson described
the evening: “She was one of those
women whose features are not perfect
and who in their moments of dimness
may not seem even pretty, but who, ex-
cited by the blood or the spirit, become
almost supernaturally beautiful.” He re-
mained in love with her for years, even
after she’d refused his offer of marriage.
It was as if he were enchanted, caught
under the “spell” that she cast on “all
ages and both sexes.”
This enchantress is the Millay whom
many came to know. She was a siren,
a seductress, a candle burning with a
“lovely light” before being unceremo-
niously snuffed out. (Millay died at
fifty-eight, of a heart attack, after fall-
ing down the stairs in her home.) Her
appeal was legendary, as was her voice,
which the poet Louis Untermeyer de-
scribed as “the sound of the ax on fresh
wood.” In her youth, she loved widely
and shamelessly, and she was adored
by a generation of young women for
the verses she wrote about her tran-
sient attachments. Today, she is often
remembered as the “poet-girl” of the
Roaring Twenties, traipsing from bed
to bed in downtown Manhattan, if she
is remembered at all.
“Rapture and Melancholy: The Di-
aries of Edna St. Vincent Millay” (Yale)
aims to capitalize on that salacious rep-
utation. In an introduction, the book’s
editor, Daniel Mark Epstein, describes
Millay as “the bad girl of American let-
ters,” a “bed-hopping” radical whose es-
capades rivalled Lord Byron’s. Epstein,
a poet himself and the author of a 2001
biography of Millay, has compiled all
Millay’s available journals, from her teen-
age years on. A foreword by the scholar
Holly Peppe, Millay’s literary executor,
promises readers a “wild and dangerous
ride” filled with “delicious new details”
about Millay’s life.
Like so many ardent vows, this is not
to be trusted. Millay was an irregular
diary keeper; as she wrote in 1927, “This
book never gets written in, except when
there’s nothing to write.” She didn’t ap-
pear to keep a diary at all between 1914
and 1920, the period when her career
took off, and Epstein includes fewer than
a dozen entries from the seven years
after that. The diaries thus shed no light
on Millay’s youthful affairs, or on the
composition of her reputation-making
poems, later collected in “A Few Figs
from Thistles” (1920), “Second April”
(1921), and “The Harp-Weaver and Other
Poems” (1922). Indeed, there is little in
the diaries about her creative process,
besides an occasional note that she
“stayed in bed as usual & worked until
noon.” And the most scandalous entries,
about her addiction to morphine, will
already be familiar to readers of Epstein’s
biography or of Nancy Milford’s supe-
rior book, “Savage Beauty.”
What the diaries do reveal is that
this supposedly ethereal creature was in
fact solidly earthbound. As a teen-ager,
Millay described the effects of hard do-
mestic labor on her body (“my poor
hands are blistered in a dozen places”);
later, rich and married, she wrote about
the joy she felt “spading & pulling” in
her garden. She tracked the changing
seasons, dutifully recording the spring’s
first bluebird and the comings and go-
ings of herbs. She also recorded mount-
In Millay’s diaries, we see a poet working through the toll of public attention. ing bodily ailments: headaches, stom- SOURCE PHOTOGRAPH FROM ALAMY
