Edna St. Vincent Millay: American Poet

Edna St. Vincent Millay was a modern American woman of the Jazz Age. Born in Rockland, Maine in 1892, she wrote poetry, plays, political letters, and even a libretto for an opera during the next five decades of her life. Millay toured the country reciting her written prose and poetry, and in 1923, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and later the Frost Medal.

I was first introduced to Edna St. Vincent Millay during a poetry unit in my freshman English class. Several things about her life piqued my interest. Her middle name comes from St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City. Shortly before her birth, her uncle was taken ill and his life was saved in the hospital. He suggested the hospital’s name as a middle name for his sister’s child. After graduating from Vassar in 1917, Millay moved to Greenwich Village. I have seen the narrow building she lived in at 75 ½ Bedford Street. Here she wrote some of the best sonnets ever by an American poet.

Millay’s poetry easily grips the heart and captures the mind. Her impassioned expressions display broad sympathies with the human experience, like her famous lines from “First Fig,”

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night.

On Valentine’s Day during my freshman year, I came across her sonnet “Love Is Not All (Sonnet XXX).” It’s title struck me as odd. Flush from reading Shakespearean sonnets that tell us that love is everything, I was drawn to Millay’s simple and true statements. Love is not food nor drink nor shelter. We know this. It cannot set a fractured bone. Still, Millay offers that many people have died for lack of it alone. Then, Millay asks herself what she would do for love. Confronted with pain or hunger or a need for peace, would she forsake love? Would I? Would you?

Her beautiful last lines give a glimpse into the soul of this exquisite lyricist.

It may well be. I do not think I would.

In an honest world, that may be the best we can hope for.

Love Is Not All (Sonnet XXX)- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.