 1892–1950,
American poet, b. Rockland, Maine, grad. Vassar College, 1917. One of
the most popular poets of her era, Millay was admired as much for the
bohemian freedom of her youthful lifestyle as for her verse. During the
early 1920s she lived in Greenwich Village, New York City, and wrote satiric
sketches for Vanity Fair under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd. Among her friends
were Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. Renascence, Millay’s first volume
of poetry, appeared in 1917 and was praised for its freshness and vitality.
It was followed by A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), Second April (1921),
and The Ballad of the Harp Weaver (1922; Pulitzer Prize). She was a member
of the Provincetown Players, a group that produced several of her verse
dramas, including Aria da Capo (1920) and Two Slatterns and a King (1921).
In 1923 she married Eugen Jan Boissevain, a Dutch coffee importer, and
moved to “Steepletop,” a farm near Austerlitz, N.Y. Although her socially
conscious later poetry is generally considered inferior to her early work,
it exhibits her absolute mastery of the sonnet form. Among her later volumes
are Fatal Interview (1931), a superb sonnet cycle; Conversation at Midnight
(1937); and Make Bright the Arrows (1940). She also wrote the libretto
for Deems Taylor’s opera The King’s Henchman (1927) and, with George Dillon,
she translated Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil (1936). Eugen Boissevain died
in the autumn of 1949, and Millay died less than a year later. In 1976
“Steepletop” opened as an arts colony (cited from the Columbia Encyclopedia,
Sixth Edition. 2001, http://www.bartleby.com/65/mi/Millay-E.html). |
