Biography Essay

Despite a publishing career that spanned three decades and a canon that ranges from lyrics to verse plays and political commentary, Edna St. Vincent Millay is probably best known for her early works, particularly "Renascence" (1912), A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), and Second April (1921). The first, a 214-line poem revealing a mystical view of the universe, God, and death, caused a sensation as the work of a girl just turned twenty. The second, a celebration of feminism and free love, caught the mood of Greenwich Village life in the racy postwar period of the 1920s. Second April showed a more honest approach to the already favorite Millay themes of death, love, and nature. Millay's admirers also commend Aria da Capo (1920), a verse play on the foolishness of war, and certain of her sonnets, especially "Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare" (1923) and the sequences, "Sonnets from an...