A precocious Jazz Age feminist, social rebel, and popular literary figure, Edna St. Vincent Millay is arguably America's finest sonneteer. She earned a reputation for mastering verse drama and intricate, emotional poetry free of Victorian cant. With fluent, sensuous grace, she contained her passions in traditional poetic forms. Her poems espouse an intimate and, at times, detached knowledge of love, but she long put off suitors who threatened her free-spirited individuality and determination to write. Her mature talent retained a sensitivity and bravado that balance heartbreak with humor.
Millay was born on February 22, 1892, in Rockland, near Maine's Penobscot Bay, a setting for her naturalistic poems as well as such localized sonnets as "I Shall Go Back" and "The Cameo." The eldest and favorite of three girls, "Vincent" grew up in Camden under the loving hand of her mother, who reared three girls alone after her husband's abrupt departure in 1900. Encouraged to study piano and literature, Millay graduated from Camden High. Disliked for intellectual snobbery, she failed to win the post of class poet because spiteful classmates refused to vote for her.
At age 14, Millay published "The Land of Romance" in Current Literature. At age 19, and already the recipient of the Intercollegiate Poetry Society prize, she achieved a rare maturity with "Renascence," chosen from 10,000 entries for the anthology The Lyric Year (1912). The most enduring of her lines, "O world, I cannot hold thee close enough," introduces "God's World," an inventive self-revelation that earned lasting critical acclaim.
