Edna St. Vincent Millay

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Edna St. Vincent Millay 1933, photographed by Carl Van Vechten

Edna St. Vincent Millay (born February 22, 1892 in Rockland , Maine , USA ; † October 19, 1950 in Austerlitz , New York ) was an American poet and playwright and the third woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for lyric poetry. She was known for her unconventional and bohemian lifestyle. For her early prose works she used the pseudonym Nancy Boyd.

Thomas Hardy once said that America had two great attractions to offer: the skyscrapers and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Life

St. Vincent Millay grew up in poverty in Camden , Maine . At the age of twenty she became famous for her poetry, and by the age of 30 she was known worldwide. The speculations and rumors due to their permissive lifestyle always left open the final answer to the question about the subject, the real addressee of their verses.

Childhood and youth

Edna St. Vincent Millay 1914, photographed by Arnold Genthe

Millay was born in Rockland to Cora Lounella Buzelle, a nurse, and Henry Tolman Millay, a teacher. Her middle name was taken from the hospital "St. Vincent ”, in which her uncle's life was saved shortly before Edna was born. She had two sisters, Norma Lounella Millay, born in 1893, and Kathleen Kalloch Millay, born in 1896.

In 1904, Edna's mother divorced him because of her husband's financial irresponsibility. At this point Edna's parents had been living apart for several years. In material and financial hardship, Cora and her three daughters moved from town to town, always in the hope of the indulgence and kindness of friends and relatives.

Although the family was very poor, Cora never traveled without her suitcase filled with books. She always carried the works of William Shakespeare , John Milton and other classical writers with her and read them to her children with enthusiasm and with her own Irish accent.

After years of odyssey, the family settled in Camden, Maine and moved into a small house owned by a well-off Aunt Coras. Millay wrote her first poems in this modest house in the middle of the fields. Cora taught her daughters to be independent and to express their own thoughts openly.

Millay preferred to be called "Vincent" rather than Edna because she found that name too common. The headmaster of her elementary school was horrified by such an idea - absurd for his understanding - and called her not Vincent, but with any female first name that begins with V.

At Camden High School, Millay began building on her burgeoning literary talents. She worked on the school literary magazine The Megunticook and, at the age of 15, eventually published some of her poems in the popular children's magazine St. Nicholas , in the Camden Herald and, most importantly, in the anthology Current Literature .

Millay became really known with her poem "Renascence" (1912), the publication and literary peculiarity of which earned her a scholarship from Vassar College . After graduating in 1917, she moved to New York City .

Career as a poet

In New York she lived in Greenwich Village . At this time Millay first gained great popularity in America. In 1923 she received the Pulitzer Prize for her volumes of poetry The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems . In 1929 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

The works and works she wrote in support of the war effort of the Allies, and especially America during World War II, temporarily damaged her reputation. She took part in several public forums, which had to promote the US readiness to participate in the Second World War. Merle Rubin commented: “ She seems to have caught more flak from the literary critics for supporting democracy than Ezra Pound did for championing fascism. ”

In 1943, Millay was awarded the Frost Medal (prize from the American Society of Poetry ) for life's work. She was the sixth person and the second woman to receive this honor.

Marriage, relationships and personal matters

Millay was bisexual and had a variety of relationships with other students during her time at Vassar College. In January 1921 she went to Paris, where she met the sculptor Thelma Ellen Wood , with whom she had a romantic relationship from then on. During her years in Greenwich Village and Paris, she also had many connections with men - including the literary critic Edmund Wilson , who proposed marriage to her in 1920, albeit unsuccessfully.

In 1923, Millay married Eugene Jan Boissevain, the then 43-year-old widower of labor lawyer and war correspondent Inez Milholland . Millay dedicated a sonnet to the memory of this woman. Boissevain was extremely supportive of Millay's career - especially by primarily assuming domestic responsibility. Both lived near Austerlitz, New York, on a farm called Steepletop, which they bought together in 1925.

Millay's marriage to Boissevain had a very open character, including the tolerated existence of lovers on both sides. Millay's most significant other relationship during this period was with the poet George Dillon , to whom she dedicated many of her sonnets. Millay worked with Dillon on Flowers of Evil , the translation of Charles Baudelaire's book of poems, Les Fleurs du Mal . Boissevain died of lung cancer in 1949.

Millay was found dead at the foot of the stairs of her home on October 19, 1950; it appeared that she had broken her neck in a fall.

Steepletop today

In 2006, New York State purchased 230 acres of the steepletop land for $ 1.69 million. The land is to be incorporated into a nearby nature reserve. The proceeds from the sale of the land will be used to restore the house and the immediately adjacent site (steepletop) based on the original plans and to convert them into a museum. Parts of Steeplewood - including a poet's trail leading to Millay's grave - are already open to the public.

Selected Works

Works

Your most famous poem

- written in 1920:

First Fig

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--

It gives a lovely light!

First fig

My candle burns at both ends;

It doesn't last the night;

But ah my enemies and oh my friends -

a beautiful light she makes!

Your shortest verse

Second Fig

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:

Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

More poems

  • Mathematicians perceive their poem “Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare” (1923) as an expression of homage and a hymn of praise for the complex beauty of mathematics - but also as an homage to Euclid .
  • However, many consider "Renascence" and "The Ballad Of The Harp-Weaver" to be Millay's greatest works.

Millay in other, later works; Attempts to translate into German

Europe has "... not seen such a collection of masterpieces for a generation ...". Rudolf Borchardt (1877–1945) announced this at the end of 1933 after reading poems by Edna St. Vincent Millays. What happened in the following years not only had a special place in Borchardt's work history, but also meant something of the highest order for the creative reception of American poetry in the German language. Borchardt was, basically completely untypical for him, full of enthusiasm for the poet or her work, which he was trying to translate, although he ultimately considered Millay's poems to be “untranslatable”. In addition to Borchardt, who has transferred a total of fifty Millays poems, mostly from “Wine from these Grapes” (1935), Günter Plessow devoted himself above all to the sonnets in his transfer, which was published in 2008 under the title “Love is not all”. In addition, eight poems from “Second April” (1923) can be found in a transmission by Klaus Bonn on the literary platform “salon littéraire”, which is run by Christiane Zintzen .

Millay is also mentioned in John Green's novel One Like Alaska , as a role model for the main character.

literature

  • Ernst Osterkamp: Edna St. Vincent Millay . Deutscher Kunstverlag, Berlin 2014
  • Gerhard Schuster (eds.): Rudolf Borchardt and Edna St. Vincent Millay. The discovery of America. Poems, transmissions, essays. Lyrik Kabinett , Munich 2004

Web links

Commons : Edna St. Vincent Millay  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Members: Edna St. Vincent Millay. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 15, 2019 .
  2. ^ "Renascence" at Bartleby
  3. ^ "The Ballad Of The Harp-Weaver" at A Celebration of Women Writers
  4. ↑ "The Discovery of America" : Rudolf Borchardt and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Poems, transmissions, essays, ed. by Gerhard Schuster. Lyrik Kabinett Munich 2004, ISBN 3-9807150-3-5
  5. ↑ Edna St. Vincent Millay: "Love is not all". Poems translated in American and German by Günter Plessow. Urs Engeler Collection Editor. Basel / Weil am Rhein 2008, ISBN 978-3-938767-52-8
  6. ↑ Edna St. Vincent Millay: Eight Poems. Transferred and commented by Klaus Bonn, Edna St. Vincent Millay: Eight Poems ( Memento from September 26, 2014 in the web archive archive.today )
personal data
SURNAME Millay, Edna St. Vincent
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American poet and playwright
DATE OF BIRTH February 22, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Rockland , Maine
DATE OF DEATH October 19, 1950
Place of death Austerlitz , New York