One of the greatest American poets of her time.--New York Times

Collected Poems features Edna St. Vincent Millay's incisive and impassioned poetry and sonnets, as well as the poet's last volume, Mine the Harvest, compiled and published in 1956 by her sister Norma Millay. Alongside Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and E. E. Cummings, Millay remains among the most celebrated poets of the early twentieth century for her uniquely lyrical explorations of love, individuality, and artistic expression.

Millay, winner in 1923 of the second annual Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a daring, versatile writer whose work includes plays, essays, short stories, and songs. She infused new life into traditional poetic forms, bringing hope to a generation of youth disillusioned by the political and social upheaval of the First World War. She ventured fearlessly beyond familiar poetic subjects to tackle political injustice, social discrimination, and women's sexuality in her poems and prose.

Yet Millay's poetry is still decisively modern in its message, and it continues to resonate with readers facing personal and moral issues that defy the test of time: romantic love, loss, betrayal, compassion for one another, social equality, patriotism, and the stewardship of the natural world.

This invaluable compendium of her work is not only an essential addition to any collection of the world's most moving and memorable poetry but an unprecedented look into the life of Millay.

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!

First Fig from A Few Figs from Thistles (1920)

Edna St. Vincent Millay defined a generation as one of the most critically acclaimed poets of the Modernist era. Her work pushed boundaries within the literary canon for its lyrical expression of female embodiment and progressive feminist politics, and she was honored as only the third woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay demonstrates Millay's legacy and influence on contemporary poetry. Sometimes satirical, often sharp, and always striking, the poems in this collection span Millay's remarkable career, from the success of Renascence and Other Poems to the sting of A Few Figs from Thistles, and Second April, as well as The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver and eight sonnets from the early twenties. Millay's incandescent poetry continues to inspire today as broadly and deeply as during her lifetime.

The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.

AMERICAN INDIAN STORIES - THE AWAKENING - THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY - THE HEADS OF CERBERUS - LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET - LOVE, ANGER, MADNESS - PASSING - THE TRANSFORMATION OF PHILIP JETTAN - VILLETTE - THERE IS CONFUSION - THE SELECTED POEMS OF EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

Millay's first three books of lyrics and sonnets are collected here: Renascence, Second April, and A Few Figs from Thistles. With a balanced and appreciative introduction and useful annotations, this volume presents some of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's best work in which she weaves intellect, emotion, and irony.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Often considered her best work, and one of the best-known American poems, the long poem Renascence is credited with introducing Edna St. Vincent Millay to a the broader world. Celebrated for their lyrical transcendence, Millay's poems convey fiery romance and an invigorating spirit that are hallmarks of her writing. Published as the inaugural title in Down East Books Maine Standards series, this volume brings the classic Renascence and two dozen other poems back to contemporary readers.

This volume includes the early poems that many consider her best-- Renascence and The Ballad of the Harp Weaver among them--as well as such often-memorized favorites as What lips my lips have kissed and First Fig (My candle burns at both ends . . .). The poet's most famous verse drama, the one-act antiwar fable Aria da Capo, is included here as well.

Claiming a lyric tradition stretching back to Sappho and Catullus and making it very much her own, Millay won over her contemporaries--and readers ever since--with her passion, erotic candor, formal elegance, and often mischievous wit. J. D. McClatchy's introduction and selections offer new and surprising insights into Millay's achievement.

Included are her most beloved and justly admired poems, such as the wry bohemian anthem Recuerdo and the sonnet sequence Fatal Interview, the poetic record of a love affair that is presented in its entirety. McClatchy has also chosen works that extend our sense of Millay's range: translations, her play Aria da Capo, and excerpts from her libretto The King's Henchman.

I have for the most part been guided by my taste for Millay at her tautest and truest, writes McClatchy. There are precise and resonant images everywhere.

About the American Poets Project
Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today's most discerning poets and critics.

An introduction by Norma Millay, written expressly for this volume, focuses on examples of the poet's variations in sonnet structure. Here is the voice of Millay, whose prophetic vision, devotion to freedom, and intellectual daring combine with her mastery of the sonnet form to speak eloquently for the human spirit.

Their musical perfection, emotional power, and superb, delicate workmanship have made Edna St. Vincent Millay one of America's great poets.

Edna St. Vincent Millay's childhood was a life of transient poverty. Her mother Cora, who was separated for many years from, and finally divorced in 1904, her father Henry Tolman Millay, moved Edna and her two sisters constantly from town to town during their upbringing. The family would finally settle in a small house on the property of Cora's aunt in Camden, Maine. It was here that Edna would write some of her first lines of poetry. Edna would first gain recognition when her 1912 poem Renascence garnered a fourth place prize in a poetry contest for The Lyric Year. Edna would go on to win the highest prize for poetry, the 1923 Pulitzer Prize, for her work The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver. Noted for its lyrical beauty and at times controversial depiction of female sexuality, the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay marks some of the best of the early 20th century. Contained in this volume, printed on a premium acid-free paper, are some of her most important works: Renascence and Other Poems, A Few Figs From Thistles, Second April, and The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver.

More than sixty years after her death, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay continues to captivate new generations of readers. The twentieth-century American author was catapulted to fame after the publication of Renascence, her first major work and a poem written while she was still a teenager. Millay's frank attitude toward sexuality--along with immortal lines such as My candle burns at both ends--solidified her reputation as the quintessential liberated woman of the Jazz Age.

In this authoritative volume, Timothy F. Jackson has compiled and annotated a new selection that represents the full range of her published work alongside previously unpublished manuscript excerpts, poems, prose, and correspondence. The poems, appearing as they were printed in their first editions, are complemented by Jackson's extensive, illuminating notes that draw on archival sources and help situate her work in its historical and literary context. Two introductory essays--one by Jackson and the other by Millay's literary executor, Holly Peppe--also help critically frame the poet's work.

This deluxe edition will be cherished by readers who continue to study and enjoy the work of this iconic figure.

Provides an occasion to revisit not just [Millay's] improbable life but also her sometimes revelatory work.--Abigail Deutsch, Wall Street Journal

Rapture and Melancholy paints a picture of artistic triumph, romantic tumult, and a daily life that descended into addiction.--Heather Clark, New York Times Book Review

The English author Thomas Hardy proclaimed that America had two great attractions: the skyscraper, and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. In these diaries the great American poet illuminates not only her literary genius, but her life as a devoted daughter, sister, wife, and public heroine; and finally as a solitary, tragic figure.

This is the first publication of the diaries she kept from adolescence until middle age, between 1907 and 1949, focused on her most productive years. Who was the girl who wrote Renascence, that marvel of early twentieth-century poetry? What trauma or spiritual journey inspired the poem? And after such celebrity why did she vanish into near seclusion after 1940? These questions hover over the life and work, and trouble biographers and readers alike. Intimate, eloquent, these confessions and keen observations provide the key to understanding Millay's journey from small-town obscurity to world fame, and the tragedy of her demise.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, (born February 22, 1892, Rockland, Maine, U.S.--died October 19, 1950, Austerlitz, New York), American poet and dramatist who came to personify romantic rebellion and bravado in the 1920s.

Millay was reared in Camden, Maine, by her divorced mother, who recognized and encouraged her talent in writing poetry. Her first published poem appeared in the St. Nicholas Magazine for children in October 1906. She remained at home after her graduation from high school in 1909, and in four years she published five more poems in St. Nicholas. Her first acclaim came when Renascence was included in The Lyric Year in 1912; the poem brought Millay to the attention of a benefactor who made it possible for her to attend Vassar College. She graduated in 1917.

In that year Millay published her first book, Renascence and Other Poems, and moved to Greenwich Village in New York City. There she became a lively and admired figure among the avant garde and radical literary set. To support herself Millay, under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd, submitted hackwork verse and short stories to magazines, and while her ambition to go on the stage was short-lived, she worked with the Provincetown Players for a time and later wrote the one-act Aria da Capo (1920) for them. The same year she published the verse collection A Few Figs from Thistles, from which the line My candle burns at both ends derives. The poem was taken up as the watchword of the flaming youth of that era and brought her a renown that she came to despise. In 1921 she published Second April and two more plays, Two Slatterns and a King and The Lamp and the Bell. She also began a two-year European sojourn, during which she was a correspondent for Vanity Fair.

Millay won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (1922) and married Eugen Jan Boissevain, a Dutch businessman with whom from 1925 she lived in a large, isolated house in the Berkshire foothills near Austerlitz, New York. In 1925 the Metropolitan Opera Company commissioned her to write an opera with Deems Taylor. The resulting work, The King's Henchman, first produced in 1927, became the most popular American opera up to its time and, published in book form, sold out four printings in 20 days.

Millay's youthful appearance, the independent, almost petulant tone of her poetry, and her political and social ideals made her a symbol of the youth of her time. In 1927 she donated the proceeds from her poem Justice Denied in Massachusetts to the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti and personally appealed to the governor of the state for their lives. Her major later works include The Buck in the Snow (1928), which introduced a more somber tone to her poetry; Fatal Interview (1931), a highly acclaimed sonnet sequence; and Wine from These Grapes (1934). Her letters were edited by A.R. Macdougall in 1952.

The bravado and stylish cynicism of much of Millay's early work gave way in later years to more personal and mature writing, and she produced, particularly in her sonnets and other short poems, a considerable body of intensely lyrical verse. A final collection of her verse appeared posthumously as Mine the Harvest in 1954. (britannica.com)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.

This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.

Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.