SOURCE: Untermeyer, Louis. “Why a Poet Should Never Be Educated.” In Critical Essays on Edna St. Vincent Millay, edited by William B. Thesing, pp. 29-32. New York: G. K. Hall, 1993.

In the following review, originally published in the Dial magazine on 14 Februrary, 1918, Untermeyer praises the collection Renascence and Other Poems as an extraordinary work in which the reader finds “a direct and often dramatic power.”

These three first volumes [First Offering by Samuel Roth; Renascence and Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay; and First Poems by Edwin Curran], with their curious kinship and even more curious contrasts, furnish a variety of themes. They offer material for several essays: on “What Constitutes Rapture”; on “The Desire of the Moth for the Star”; on “The Growing Tendency among Certain Publishers to Ask One Dollar and Fifty Cents for Seventy Pages of Verse”; on “A Bill for the Conservation of...