User:Clemonskatalogs/sandbox

5 points:

- Femenist

- Bisexual

- Challenged the Status Quo (Life at Vassar)

- Liberal Home Life

- Her Use of Poetry

Source:

Burning Candles: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

= Edna St. Vincent Millay = Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 – October 19, 1950) was an American lyrical poet, playwright, and feminist. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the third woman to win the award for poetry. She used the pseudonym Nancy Boyd for her prose work. The poet Richard Wilbur asserted, "She wrote some of the best sonnets of the century."

Early life[ edit]
Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, to Cora Lounella Buzelle, a nurse, and Henry Tolman Millay, a schoolteacher who would later become a superintendent of schools. Her middle name derives from St. Vincent's Hospital in New York, where her uncle's life had been saved just before her birth. The family's house was "between the mountains and the sea where baskets of apples and drying herbs on the porch mingled their scents with those of the neighboring pine woods." In 1904, Cora officially divorced Millay's father for financial irresponsibility and domestic abuse, but they had already been separated for some years. Henry and Millay kept a letter correspondence for many years, but he never re-entered the family. Cora and her three daughters, Edna (who called herself "Vincent"), Norma Lounella (born 1893), and Kathleen Kalloch (born 1896), moved from town to town, living in poverty and surviving various illnesses. Cora travelled with a trunk full of classic literature, including Shakespeare and Milton, which she read to her children. The family settled in a small house on the property of Cora's aunt in Camden, Maine, where Millay would write the first of the poems that would bring her literary fame. Edna St. Vincent Millay in Mamaroneck, NY, 1914, by Arnold Genthe.

The three sisters were independent and spoke their minds, which did not always sit well with the authority figures in their lives. Millay's grade school principal, offended by her frank attitudes, refused to call her Vincent. Instead, he called her by any woman's name that started with a V. At Camden High School, Millay began developing her literary talents, starting at the school's literary magazine, The Megunticook. At 14 she won the St. Nicholas Gold Badge for poetry, and by 15, she had published her poetry in the popular children's magazine St. Nicholas, the Camden Herald, and the high-profile anthology Current Literature.

Millay entered Vassar College in 1913 when she was 21 years old, later than usual. '''Her attendance at Vassar became a strain to her due to its strict nature. Before she attended the college Millay had a liberal home life that included smoking, drinking, playing gin rummy, and flirting with men. Vassar, on the other hand, expected its students to be refined and live according to their status as young women.''' She had relationships with many fellow students during her time there and kept scrapbooks including drafts of plays written during the period. While at school, she had several relationships with women, including Edith Wynne Matthison, who would go on to become an actress in silent films.

New York City
After her graduation from Vassar in 1917, Millay moved to New York City. She lived in a number of places in Greenwich Village, including a house owned by the Cherry Lane Theatre and 75½ Bedford Street, renowned for being the narrowest in New York City. While in New York City, Millay lived an openly bisexual lifestyle. The critic Floyd Dell wrote that the red-haired and beautiful Millay was "a frivolous young woman, with a brand-new pair of dancing slippers and a mouth like a valentine." Millay described her life in New York as "very, very poor and very, very merry." While establishing her career as a poet, Millay initially worked with the Provincetown Players on Macdougal Street and the Theatre Guild. In 1924 Millay and others founded the Cherry Lane Theater "to continue the staging of experimental drama." Magazine articles under a pseudonym also helped support her early days in the village. '''During her stay in Greenwitch Village, Millay learned to use her poetry in her feminist activism. She often went into detail about topics others found taboo, such as a wife leaving her husband in the middle of the night.'''

Counted among Millay's close friends were the writers Witter Bynner, Arthur Davison Ficke, and Susan Glaspell, as well as Floyd Dell and the critic Edmund Wilson, both of whom proposed marriage to her and were refused. Millay had a way of wrapping men around her finger, even after their rejection. Edmund Wilson, for example, spoke of her highly because Millay took his virginity but she recanted of his advances and rejected his marriage proposal, but he remained a loyal friend.