Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, in 1892. Raised in a single-parent home, encouraged to be ambitious and self-sufficient with an appreciation of music and literature at an early age. Her poem Renascence won her fourth place and publication in The Lyric Year, immediate acclaim, and a scholarship to Vassar where she became poet and playwright.
She moved to Greenwich Village in New York where she led a notoriously Bohemian life. Living in a nine-foot-wide attic, Millay wrote that the writers of Greenwich Village, including herself, were "very, very poor and very, very merry." In 1923, Millay's fourth volume of poems, The Harp Weaver, was awarded the Pulitzer prize. She was married in 1923 to Eugen Boissevain who gave up his own pursuits to manage Millay's literary career. The marriage lasted 26 years ending with the death of Eugen Boissevain in 1949. Edna St. Vincent Millay died of heart failure in 1950.
Some Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay
Renascence and Other Poems