Edna St Vincent Millay

Joel Van Valin (Independent Scholar - Europe)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

Born 22 Feb 1892
Died 19 Oct 1950
Activity 1912-1950

Places

Born in United States
Active in United States; France

Activities

Primary

Librettist
Playwright / Dramatist
Poet
Satirist
Translator

Resources

Although her successors were few and her innovations minor, Edna St. Vincent Millay remains a candescent figure in 20th century American literature. If F. Scott Fitzgerald was the fictional voice of the Lost Generation , she was its poetic spokesperson. A well-known personality in Greenwich Village, Millay was legendary for her Byronic attitude and casual affairs. Heightened by music and irreverent wit, her poetry contains complex, intuitive meter and rhyme variations, and she was considered by some contemporaries to be among America’s greatest lyric poets.

Born in 1892 in Rockport Maine, her parents separated when she was eight. Cora Millay moved her daughters Edna (the eldest), Norma and Kathleen to several locales in New …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

1020 words

Citation: Van Valin, Joel. "Edna St Vincent Millay". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 November 2005 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3115, accessed 26 November 2024.]

View recommended reading for this article

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here