Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, on February 22, 1892, to an independent mother, Cora, who, after asking her husband to leave the family home in 1899, raised her three daughters on her own, encouraging them to be ambitious and self-sufficient, teaching them an appreciation of literature and music from an early age. In 1912, at her mother’s urging, Millay entered her poem “Renascence” into a contest: she won fourth place and publication in The Lyric Year, bringing her immediate acclaim and a scholarship to Vassar. There, she continued to write poetry and became involved in the theatre. She also developed intimate relationships with several women while in school, including the English actress Wynne Mathisson. In 1917, the year of her graduation, Millay published her first book, Renascence and Other Poems. At the request of Vassar’s drama department, she also wrote her first verse play, The Lamp and the Bell (1921), a work about love between women (which was to be one of the major diachronic themes of her poetry).

In New York’s Greenwich Village Millay, whose friends called her “Vincent,” led a notoriously Bohemian life, true to her belief (evident in her work too) in the integrity of the individual as artist and as citizen. She joined the Provincetown Players at their early days and befriended writers such as Witter Bynner, Edmund Wilson, Susan Glaspell, and Floyd Dell. She deliberately steered clear of all “schools”; yet as a widely-read person, Millay absorbed influences from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poets, hence her devotion to the sonnet form, in which she has no peer in all of American literature.

In 1920, Millay published A Few Figs from Thistles, a volume of poetry which drew much attention for its controversial descriptions of female sexuality and feminism. In 1923, her fourth volume of poems, The Harp Weaver, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In addition to publishing three plays in verse, Millay also wrote the libretto of one of the few American grand operas, The King’s Henchman (1927).

In 1923, Millay married Eugene Boissevain, who gave up his own pursuits to manage Millay’s literary career and public appearances to Millay’s increasing fame. According to Millay herself, the couple acted like two bachelors, remaining “sexually open” throughout their twenty-six-year marriage, which ended with Boissevain’s death in 1949, a year before Millay’s own demise. (URL: www. poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/160).