A Tale of Two Ednas, Part I: The Poet

"Edna," like "Mildred" or "Blanche," is one of those old-fashioned women's names only an unfeeling parent would give a modern child. But two writers I admire -- Edna St. Vincent Millay and Edna Ferber -- had that first name. 

"Edna" comes from the same root as "Eden," and means "pleasure," which might surprise some people! Though if you think about poet Millay's life and reputation, maybe not.  Today's post is about her life and work.

In my last post for this blog, I included some feminist critique of historical sources, specifically about the difficulty of finding information about the wives (especially the first wives) of famous male figures. Added to last week's critique is now added my current frustration that Wikipedia allows people with an agenda to write/edit biographies of famous women.

The Wikipedia piece on Millay, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is made up almost entirely of suppositions about the famous poet's love life and sexual allure. This gossipy speculative stew is spiced sharply with dark hints about various Millay family issues and Edna's own set of painful misfortunes. Awful stuff.  Happily, there's an alternative; the Poetry Foundation website offers a full and detailed biography, which maintains a measured balance of information on the poet's work, interests, adventures, and romances. 

By all reports, Edna St. Vincent Millay was charismatic in general and positively riveting when reading her work for an audience.  The YouTube clip below features audio of Millay, lush with her rolling r's and  full lady-poet diction, as she reads "Love Is Not All."

And that's just the thirtieth sonnet; Millay wrote a lot of them. Reader, you finding yourself a little vague on sonnets? If you took high school English more than a year or two ago, you may have forgotten sonnet structure: fourteen lines, ten syllables per line, with internal rhymes. For example, "drink" in the first line rhymes with "sink" in the third. 

Millay actually wrote many poems about subjects other than love, which will shock researchers who rely only on Wikipedia. For example, below you will find a stanza from "Renascence," the poem most critics view as Millay's most skillful work. 

"Renascence" is an alternate spelling for Renaissance, and in this case it means something dormant is waking up again. The poem is from the viewpoint of someone lying in the grave and doing a leisurely mull-over on the meaning of a lifetime. 

(You can find the full 300-line poem here.) 

I resonate with this stanza, being a person who longs for the understanding I hope to have when the limits of Earthly existence have fallen away. I can also relate personally to a number of Edna St. Vincent Millay's ordinary life experiences. This includes the loss of an entire manuscript in a house fire, followed by the reconstruction of all the lost work from memory. 

While I was luckier than Millay and eventually recovered my own badly-damaged novel manuscript after the fire, on another occasion  I did lose an entire short story during the earliest days of word processing. Around 1986 or so, an entire afternoon's work could easily disappear with a just  blip on a suddenly-dark PC screen. 

The morning after I lost all of "Hansen Dodge", I found that I remembered the best parts of the story and I painstaking l reconstructed it from memory. (You can find the rebuilt short story right here.)

After Edna St. Vincent Millay watched her writing studio and its contents burn to the ground, the poet  began the process of rebuilding her collection Conversation at Midnight.  Alas, she ran into troubles which far outstripped my own struggles.  

In 1936, a series of awful things happened within a few short months, including a car accident which left Millay with a back injury, and it was quite a struggle to reconstruct that burned-up  volume of poetry. Conversation at Midnight, due to Millay's diligence while she began to endure a series of back operations, appeared in 1937.

Millay lived until 1950, and under difficult circumstances she completed five more volumes of verse.  I treasure this volume of her last poems.

 

Millay's birthplace was Rockland, Maine. Currently I live about an hour and a half's drive south of there. 

Conveniently, there's a bus from Portland, just over the bridge from where I live, to Rockland, and I'm planning a day trip this autumn to see the house where Millay was born. 

I don't know whether building, now a literary center, will be open any time soon because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Even if everything's closed I might go anyway, and stand with a paper cup of coffee, looking at the house and reciting "First Fig." I'm sure it's been done before. 

 

And in the future, I can always plan a visit to the Millay exhibit on the Vassar campus (Millay was an alumna), because I'd like to steal -- I mean, see Millay's Remington typewriter.

Next week: The other Edna -- a novelist and screenwriter 

Garbo