Today’s Almanac-February 22, 2010
On February 22, 1892 poet and defiant bohemian Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockton, Maine. Her mother was a restless feminist who threw her father out of the house and encouraged her daughter’s education, literary aspirations, and social unconventionality. Millay’s talent shown early as she won a prestigious literary award and publication in an important anthology which earned her a scholarship to Vassar. She continued to write while in school and published her first collection, Renascence and Other Poems while still an undergraduate. She also became involved in theater and completed her first play in verse, The Lamp and the Bell with the encouragement of the faculty. The play’s theme, love and romance between women, reflected the several passionate affairs in which Millay was involved as a student. After graduation she made a bee line for New York’s Greenwhich Village, ground zero for American literary, artistic, and political bohemianism. Living on the stark edge of poverty in an attic room not much larger than a closet, she wrote furiously and eked out a living as a writer. But she did not suffer for her art. She reveled in it and in the rowdy Village scene. A great beauty with wispy light brown hair and a charming companion, she was loved, and loved in return, a parade of women and men. Several men, including critic Edmund Wilson, proposed marriage, which she universally turned down as she did the pleas of women lovers for committed relationships. She was proudly bi-sexual and non-monogamous on principle. Wilson said that falling in love with her was, "was so common an experience, so almost inevitable a consequence of knowing her in those days." Millay continued to work in theater and became an early member of the Provincetown Players. She published volumes of poetry that drew praise and consternation in equal measure, winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Harp Weaver in 1923. The same year she surprised friends by marrying the widower of Inez Milholland and a self-proclaimed feminist Eugen Boissevain. They maintained an open relationship with both parties frequently taking lovers. The extent of their own sexual relationship is the subject of some controversy. Millay once described them as living like a pair of old bachelors. But it was a close and loving relationship. Boissevain devoted himself to managing Millay’s career, and set up the public lectures and readings through which she would become famous and, at last, financially secure. After her husband died in 1949, Millay followed him to the grave the next year at the age of 58.