The New York Times Covers edna St. Vincent Millay

Guest post by Emily Schuck (full bio below)

One hundred years ago today … The New York Times covered an upcoming spread in Vanity Fair of the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Millay—though primarily and popularly recognized as a poet—was also a prose writer, actress, playwright, and avid feminist.

The poem printed in The New York Times was the third in a sequence of four sonnets that appeared in the November issue of Vanity Fair, along with four other poems. The Times reported that Millay had “grown a trifle magazinish . . . but this has not grown so distressingly apparent as to obviously hurt the quality of her work. Still, it is a bad manifestation, and it is to be hoped that Miss Millay eradicates it while there is yet time.”

Vanity Fair regularly published Millay’s poetry and prose. Her poem “Scrub,” in the 1920 October issue, was juxtaposed with a review of James Joyce’s Ulysses [Editor: a big deal in 1920 NY] that recounted conversation with one of Millay’s many lovers, Edmund “Bunny” Wilson.

(Editor's Note: we previously featured Vanity Fair in our writeup about Dorothy Parker getting fired from the magazine and in several subsequent linked posts.)

Despite the financial security (if minimal) that Vanity Fair provided for Millay, she wasn’t without qualms. In a letter to Witter Bynner, Millay wrote with disdain about the portrait Vanity Fair included with the poems.

 “The current Vanity Fair has a whole page of my poems, and a photograph of me that looks about as much like me as it does like Arnold Bennett. And there have been three reviews of something I wrote, in New York newspapers alone. I am so incorrigibly ingenuous that these things mean just as much to me as ever.”

In the same letter, she expressed her affinity for shopping: 

“Besides, I just got a prize of a hundred dollars in Poetry, for the Bean-stalk. And I am spending it all on clothes. I’ve the sweetest new evening gown you ever saw, and shoes with straps across them, and stockings with embroidery up the front” (Milford 199).

An exemplar of the bohemian movement that would become associated with Greenwich Village, Millay is known for her promiscuity, uninhibited in her love affairs with both men and women. Her poetry reflects this. One biographer writes, “Her sonnets were celebrated for their flippant attitude toward love, their nervy assertion that a woman had the same right to sexual infidelity and amorous adventure of men” (Barnet 90).

Millay’s sister, Norma, told biographer Nancy Milford that she had only destroyed three things: an “indiscreet” letter to a young homosexual man, a collection of pornographic photographs, and “an ivory dildo, which Norma admitted was difficult to burn, but she’d managed.”

 Of her best-known poems is the first in her collection A Few Figs from Thistles, published by Frank Shay in 1920. It was originally published in Poetry in 1918:

 My candle burns at both ends;
  It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
   It gives a lovely light!

Dubbed “the most distinguished American poet of the younger generation,” Millay would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the first woman in its history, for her collection The Ballad of the Harp Weaver.

References/Further reading:

Barnet, Andrea. All Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913-1930. Algonquin, 2004.

Dash, Joan. A Life of One’s Own: Three Gifted Women and the Men They Married. Paragon House, 1988. 

Dell, Jerri. Blood Too Bright: Floyd Dell Remembers Edna St. Vincent Millay. Glenemere Press, 2017.

Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House, 2001.

WRITTEN BY eMILY SCHUCK, OCTOBER 24, 2020.

Emily Schuck is a PhD student and writer living in Southern California, where she serves as editor-in-chief of Foothill Poetry Journal. Find her on twitter @emilyschuck.

TAGS: poetry, poets, verse, women writers, magazines, newspapers, bohemianism, Greenwich Village, lgbtq history