Public reception brought Millay a patron, Caroline B. Dow, who heard her read "Renascence" at the Whitehall Inn. Dow paid Millay's college tuition to Vassar, where language study and feminist ferment infused her socialist bent. Energized by a romantic attachment to poet Arthur Davison Ficke, she began a sonnet cycle while completing a degree, which was momentarily threatened when she was suspended for disobedience. In 1917, she published a first volume, Renascence and Other Poems, comprised of lyrics and both Elizabethan and Shakespearian sonnets.
Intent on an acting career, Millay settled in Greenwich Village, New York, where she helped found the Cherry Lane Theater. To earn a living, she served as a personal secretary and freelanced short stories for Ainslee and Metropolitan under the pen name Nancy Boyd. Her dreams of acting faded, but her one-act experimental drama, Aria da Capo, a stylized piece protesting World War I, flourished at the Provincetown Playhouse in 1919. Influenced by Village radicals, she expressed social consciousness, pacifism, and sexual freedom in A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), which showcased euphoric love in "Recuerdo" and a notorious cynicism in "My candle burns at both ends," a wholehearted declaration of the unconventional life.
The release of Second April (1921) cinched Millay's reputation as the leading female poet of the age and the spokeswoman for the independent female, whom she championed for setting personal standards of love and sexuality. She completed two more plays, Two Slatterns and a King (1921) and The Lamp and the Bell (1921).
