Edna St. Vincent Millay, that once-towering literary figure, was less than five feet tall and only eighteen years old when she wrote the 214-line philosophical poem, “Renascence,” that would make her famous. One evening, her enchanting public reading of it (she was a fine elocutionist and amateur actress, with an accent that was said to sound vaguely British but like nobody else’s), in conjunction with her performance of songs of her own composing, induced a listener, Caroline B. Dow, to raise money to send this girl from rural Maine to Vassar. She inspired loyalty. Later, in Greenwich Village, she became the idol not only of the critics but of a generation of Americans who saw her as the embodiment of the flapper era; they learned by heart her defiant sonnets addressed to the lovers she had let go, few of whom seemed to blame her seriously or for long. When she died, at the age of fifty-eight, in 1950, she had produced what would constitute a Collected Poems of over seven hundred pages, as well as translations, plays, and an opera libretto. And yet her passing went barely remarked in the literary journals. Today, although her Collected Poems remains in print, she is often regarded as something of a joke, and is denied even a token appearance in most of the respected anthologies.

Millay’s story is one of our century’s most extreme cautionary tales about the whims of critical favor. In his memoirs, her friend Max Eastman