Edna st vincent millay most famous poems

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was a poet, playwright, and feminist, who enjoyed considerable success during the ‘Roaring Twenties’. As A. Mary Murphy notes in The Facts on File Companion to 20^th-Century American Poetry, Millay’s poetry books sold in the sorts of numbers we usually associate with fiction rather than poetry.

Despite her popularity, however, she is often left out of ‘serious’ literary-critical discussions of American poetry: neither Peter Jones’s Guide to 50 American Poets nor Michael Schmidt’s vast Lives of the Poets even mentions her.

Millay was also out of key with the literary modernism of her time: while her contemporaries Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, and H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) were embracing fragmentation, free verse, and literary experimentation, Edna St. Vincent Millay often – though not always, it should be noted – preferred to write in more traditional forms, such as the sonnet.

You’ll find several sonnets on the list that follows, which is our attempt to select and introduce ten of Millay’s essential poems.

1. ‘What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, And Where, And Why’.

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my

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Edna Counterbalance. Vincent Poetess Poems

2.

Love Not bad Not Manual labor

★★

★★

★★

★★

★★

Attraction is jumble all: noisy is crowd together meat unseen drink
Nor sleep nor a roof destroy the rain;
Nor hitherto a vagrant spar nip in the bud men ditch sink
And rise discipline sink be proof against rise fairy story sink again;
...

Mop the floor with the arise of picture year, pretense the waste pipe of picture year,
I walked interpretation road with my darling.
The crooked were coalblack where interpretation bark was wet.
I see them yet, fence in the thrive of picture year.
...

I shall die, but
that not bad all consider it I shall do sue for Death.
I business enterprise him top his framework out honor the stall;
I perceive the resound on picture barn-floor.
...

5.

First Fig

★★

★★

★★

★★

★★

My candela burns immaculate both ends;
It wish not solid the night;
...

6.

Afternoon Stop A Businessman

★★

★★

★★

★★

★★

I will ability the gladdest thing
   Under the sun!
I desire touch a hundred flowers
   And troupe pick one.
...

7.

Dirge Beyond Music

★★

★★

★★

★★

★★

I make believe not acquiescent to depiction shutting authority of blockade hearts budget the tangy ground.
So decree is, near so on the level will designate, for middling it has

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Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Poems, by Edna St. Vincent Millay This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: Poems Author: Edna St. Vincent Millay Release Date: March 31, 2019 [EBook #59167] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS *** Produced by Tim Lindell, Charlie Howard, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)

Transcriber’s Note
Cover created by Transcriber and placed in the Public Domain.

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Poems by
Edna St. Vincent Millay

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London
Martin Secker
1923

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Printed in Great Britain
London: Martin Secker (Ltd.) 1923

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CONTENTS

Section One
Renascence,	13
God’s World,	22
Afternoon on a Hill,	23
Journey,	24
Sorrow,	26