For a long while, the case of Edna St. Vincent Millay has seemed a doleful one. In 1911 it was her fate to ignite a sensation with her first collection, Renascence; in 1923, to be the first woman poet to win a Pulitzer Prize; throughout the 1920s and 1930s, to enjoy more critical acclaim and popularity than poets ordinarily attain; but in later life to be dismissed as a moldy fig. She has very nearly gone the way of lesser poets who make the mistake of signing their work with three names. Her Collected Poems is no longer a fixture on the poetry shelf of every bookshop, and in the initial volume of the Library of America’s anthology of twentieth-century American poetry, she places a mere fourth among woman poets in the number of allotted pages—about a third the space squandered on the maunderings of Gertrude Stein. Perhaps now, with the simultaneous appearance of two new critical biographies derived from long-guarded materials, her stock may be in for a rise.¹

Like earlier biographers, both Daniel Mark Epstein and Nancy Milford portray Millay as a gallant child. While her divorced mother Cora, a practical nurse, worked night and day, Millay served as surrogate mother to her two younger sisters: cooking, baking, cleaning, mending, scrubbing till she bloodied her hands. All the while, she excelled in school, acted in plays, practiced piano, and won poetry prizes.