SOURCE: Benfey, Christopher. “Flawed Perfection.” The New Republic 225, no. 19 (5 November 2001): 39-42.

In the following excerpt, Benfey describes Renascence as a “claustrophobic” masterpiece.

Millay's childhood is a story of precocious virtuosity. She excelled at everything, and was always the leading lady in the school play, the class poet (except once, when her classmates, tired of her queenly ways, voted for the class dullard), the star. Music and poetry were her refuge from the daily grind of keeping house in ever more modest rented rooms along the rocky Maine coast. Nancy Milford, in the moving opening section of her painstaking and sympathetic biography [Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay], cites a poignant memory of Millay searching for a chord on the organ, and asking her exhausted mother for help.

We did not have the notes of it, it was something she knew by heart. I called her...