Collected Sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay

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). 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 appear to keep a diary at all between 19, the period when her career took off, and Epstein includes fewer than a dozen entries from the seven years after that. Like so many ardent vows, this is not to be trusted. 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.

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.

In an introduction, the book’s editor, Daniel Mark Epstein, describes Millay as “the bad girl of American letters,” a “bed-hopping” radical whose escapades rivalled Lord Byron’s.

Vincent Millay” (Yale) aims to capitalize on that salacious reputation. “Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St. 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. (Millay died at fifty-eight, of a heart attack, after falling down the stairs in her home.) Her appeal was legendary, as was her voice, which the poet Louis Untermeyer described 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 transient attachments. She was a siren, a seductress, a candle burning with a “lovely light” before being unceremoniously snuffed out. This enchantress is the Millay whom many came to know. It was as if he were enchanted, caught under the “spell” that she cast on “all ages and both sexes.” 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, excited by the blood or the spirit, become almost supernaturally beautiful.” He remained in love with her for years, even after she’d refused his offer of marriage. Wilson, a well-bred graduate of Princeton, was a fan of the twenty-eight-year-old poet’s work-he’d taken to reciting one of her sonnets in the shower-but he was, in her physical presence, overcome. It was at a party in Greenwich Village, in the spring of 1920, that the critic Edmund Wilson first encountered Edna St.

Collected Sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay