Edna St Vincent Millay - Renascence & Other Poems: "The young are so old, they are born with their fingers crossed"

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born on 22nd February 1892 in Rockland, Maine, the eldest of three daughters.

Her early years were tinted with much difficulty; divorced parents, poverty and a constant change of location.

Despite this once settled in Camden, Maine Edna developed her literary talents at a furious rate. By 15, she had published her poetry in the popular children's magazine St. Nicholas, the Camden Herald, and the high-profile anthology Current Literature.

In 1912, at 20, she entered her poem ‘Renascence’ in The Lyric Year poetry contest. Despite being considered the best poem it was only given fourth place. The ensuing uproar brought publicity and the offer of funding for her education at Vassar College. Here she wrote, both verse and plays as well as embarking on a series of affairs with women as she explored the wider world and all it offered.

Edna achieved significant fame when she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923 for ‘The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver’. It was a magnificent triumph.

She married Eugen Jan Boissevain but on her wedding day she fell ill and he drove her to Manhattan for emergency surgery. He nursed her back to health with remarkable devotion. They were together, in an open marriage, until his death in 1949.

In the summer of 1936, Edna was riding in a station wagon when the door swung open and she was hurled into the pitch-darkness and rolled into a rocky gully. She survived but with severely damaged nerves in her spine and was to live the rest of her life in pain.

In 1942 in an article for The New York Times Magazine, Edna mourned the callous destruction of the Czechoslovak town of Lidice by Nazi forces in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. The article would serve as the basis of her 32-page poem, ‘Murder of Lidice’ in 1942.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, after suffering a heart attack, fell down the stairs and died at her home on 19th October 1950. She was 58 years old.

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