poetry

A Visit to the Asylum

Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892 - 1950

Once from a big, big building,
When I was small, small,
The queer folk in the windows
Would smile at me and call.
       And in the hard wee gardens
Such pleasant men would hoe:
“Sir, may we touch the little girl’s hair!”—
It was so red, you know.
       They cut me coloured asters
With shears so sharp and neat,
They brought me grapes and plums and pears
And pretty cakes to eat.
       And out of all the windows,
No matter where we went,
The merriest eyes would follow me
And make me compliment.
       There were a thousand windows,
All latticed up and down.
And up to all the windows,
When we went back to town,
       The queer folk put their faces,
As gentle as could be;
“Come again, little girl!” they called, and I
Called back, “You come see me!”

Poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, on February 22, 1892. Her mother, Cora, raised her three daughters on her own after asking her husband to leave the family home in 1899. Cora encouraged her girls to be ambitious and self-sufficient, teaching them an appreciation of music and literature from an early age. In 1912, at her mother’s urging, Millay entered her poem “Renascence” into a contest: she won fourth place and publication in The Lyric Year, bringing her immediate acclaim and a scholarship to Vassar College. There, she continued to write poetry and became involved in the theater. She also developed intimate relationships with several women while in school, including the English actress Wynne Matthison. In 1917, the year of her graduation, Millay published her first book, Renascence and Other Poems. At the request of Vassar’s drama department, she also wrote her first verse play, The Lamp and the Bell (1921), a work about love between women.
After graduating from Vassar, Millay, whose friends called her “Vincent," moved to New York City’s Greenwich Village, where she led a Bohemian life. She lived in a nine-foot-wide attic and wrote anything she could find an editor willing to accept. She and the other writers of Greenwich Village were, according to Millay herself, “very, very poor and very, very merry.” She joined the Provincetown Players in its early days and befriended writers such as Witter Bynner, Edmund Wilson, Susan Glaspell, and Floyd Dell, who asked for Millay’s to marry him. Millay, who was openly bisexual, refused, despite Dell’s attempts to persuade her otherwise. That same year Millay published A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), a volume of poetry which drew much attention for its controversial descriptions of female sexuality and feminism. In 1923, Millay was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver. In addition to publishing three plays in verse, Millay also wrote the libretto of one of the few American grand operas, The King’s Henchman (1927).
Millay married Eugen Boissevain, a self-proclaimed feminist and widower of Inez Milholland, in 1923. Boissevain gave up his own pursuits to manage Millay’s literary career, setting up the readings and public appearances for which Millay grew quite famous. According to Millay’s own accounts, the couple acted liked two bachelors, remaining “sexually open” throughout their twenty-six-year marriage, which ended with Boissevain’s death in 1949. Edna St. Vincent Millay died in 1950.

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Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Collected Poems (1956)
Mine the Harvest (1954)
Collected Poems (1949)
Poem and Prayer for an Invading Army (1944)
Collected Lyrics (1943)
Collected Sonnets (1941)
Invocation of the Muses (1941)
Make Bright the Arrows (1940)
There Are No Islands Any More (1940)
Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939)
Conversations at Midnight (1937)
Wine from These Grapes (1934)
Fatal Interview (1931)
The Buck in the Snow (1928)
Distressing Dialogues (1924)
Poems (1923)
The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (1922)
Second April (1921)
A Few Figs from Thistles (1920)
Renascence and Other Poems (1917)
Drama
The Murder of Lidice (1942)
The Princess Marries the Page (1932)
The King’s Henchmanv (1927)
Three Plays (1926)
Distressing Dialogues (1924)
Aria da Capo (1921)
The Lamp and the Bell (1921)
Two Slatterns and a King (1921)