The New Poetry: An Anthology

1919

Special Collections PR1225 M667 1919

New York: The Macmillan Company

American poet, playwright, activist and rebel, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) grew up poor in Maine. Her writing career launched proper when she entered her poem ‘Renascence’ (1912) in a competition. She did not win, but her reputation as an independently minded woman who wrote about female sexuality, and played with the ‘conventional gender roles in poetry’, began to form. Millay, a bisexual, insisted on being called Vincent, and she became ‘a spokesperson for women’s rights and social equality’. She married in 1923, the same year that she won the Pulitzer Prize, and her feminist husband took care of all the domestics of life so Millay could concentrate on her writing. Harriet Monroe, an editor of this Anthology, described her as the ‘greatest woman poet since Sappho’.