St. Vincent

The poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) have been long admired for the lyric beauty that is especially characteristic of her early works. "Renascence," the first of her poems to bring her public acclaim, was written when she was nineteen. Now one of the best-known American poems, it is a fervent and moving account of spiritual rebirth.
In 1917, "Renascence" was incorporated into her first volume of poetry, which is reprinted here,...

In finely crafted lyrics and sonnets, Edna St. Vincent Millay gave voice to her generation's claim to personal freedom and earned a reputation as a sexually liberated free-thinker. But her subject matter varies widely - from meditations on nature, love, life, loss, death, and the reincarnation of the human soul to commentaries on politics and discrimination against women - and reveals poetic influences from the classical to the romantic. Comprising...

From the bohemian outpost of Greenwich Village during the Jazz Age, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) sounded a clarion call for the impassioned youth of her generation. Her rare mixture of clever cynicism and wistful tenderness captivated readers, who reveled in the jubilant defiance of such poems as the title piece of this collection, "First Fig": "My candle burns at both ends;/It will not last the night;/But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends

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A young widow living in the Pennsylvania mountains and flipping burgers for hunters and hikers befriends a stranger visiting from Uzbekistan and becomes embroiled in a manhunt after he confesses to committing a terrible crime in his home country.

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Passionately admired, Eda St. Vincent Millay's works are some of the most often memorized of modern poetry. Early Works of Edna St. Millay reprints the early poems and plays that created the famous figure of the "girl poet." Published between 1917 and 1921, and collected in this volume, are the three books of poems Renascence and Other Poems, A Few Figs from the Thistles,...