The siren

She bedded countless men (and women) and became the most celebrated woman of her day. She wasn't a rock star -- she was poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.

By Laura Miller

Sept. 6, 2001 | "People who never in all their lives, except when in school and under compulsion, have held a book of poems in their hands, might well be attracted by the erotic autobiography of a fairly conspicuous woman, even if she did write poetry." So wrote Edna St. Vincent Millay toward the end of her life, in response to a suggestion from her publisher that she put together a volume of her love poems that would contain "a mellow Foreword in retrospect" confiding "when, where, and under what impulsion" she wrote each one. As her editor knew, such a foreword -- the first-person account of a legendary amorous career that included a formidable number of men and women, single and married -- would probably wind up consuming more pages than the poems themselves.

Millay dismissed the "indelicacy" of this idea with good humor and the wit of a literary Mae West: "It may be said of me by Harper & Brothers, that although I reject their proposals, I welcome their advances." But over 50 years later, with two new biographies of Millay appearing this fall -- "Savage Beauty" by Nancy Milford and "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed" by Daniel Mark Epstein -- it's the poet's love life, above all, that seems likely to attract readers to the books. Few students are under any compulsion to read her verse anymore; it has fallen far out of fashion among critics and scholars. A mighty fall it was, too, for at one time Millay was phenomenally popular as well as critically acclaimed. The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, she once published a book of sonnets that sold 35,000 copies in two weeks (and this was during the Depression). In 1928, her royalty income was the equivalent of $200,000 in today's dollars, and in 1938 she was voted one of the 10 most famous women in America. Thomas Hardy said that the skyscraper and Millay's poetry were the two great things to come out of America, and the critic Edmund Wilson thought she had "more character and more genius" than F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Millay belonged to nearly the last generation of poet icons, people whose lives meant as much to their admirers as their work. In her youth she flirted with the idea of becoming an actress, and the genius so many people saw in her was inextricable from her ability to look and behave exactly like her audience's notion of a divinely inspired girl poet. She traveled the country, reading to packed halls of rapt listeners in a voice described as sounding like "a bronze bell" and "an axe on fresh wood." It's not that such bards no longer exist, it's just that now they inevitably carry a guitar; singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega is a better parallel to Millay than any of the mandarins writing poetry today.

The deprivation of her childhood made Millay's later successes all the sweeter. Growing up in and around Camden, Maine, Millay -- whose mother, Cora, had divorced her husband when Edna was 7 and was frequently away from home working as a sicknurse -- had to run the household and care for her two younger sisters, Norma and Kathleen, mostly on her own. Still the family was remarkably close, weaving a charmed circle of shared games, songs, inside jokes, pet names and poetry around themselves. Many of her adult friends (including Wilson, who was also one of her paramours) observed that the true love of Edna's life was probably her mother.

As with all of Edna's relationships, the emotional volume between mother and daughter was turned up to 11. Milford includes some entries from Cora's diary in which she rages against a man (a "spineless jellyfish" in her opinion) whom her daughter took up with while the two women were visiting Paris together in the '20s: "I cannot be away from her and live, and if I stay I shall die. When he is with her my heart is hurt physically, it aches like a sore, and cries out against the outrage to my womb." Edna could be nearly as passionate when it was her turn to worry. "I think about you all the time in the daytime, and lately I dream about you at night," she wrote Cora when she was concerned about the older woman's health. "There is nothing in all the world I love so much as you."

Nevertheless, when Millay saw her chance to get out of Camden, she took off like a jackrabbit. A patron, an older woman who had heard her recite her poem "Renascence" at a party, managed to finagle her a scholarship to the women's college Vassar, where she proceeded to break the hearts of half the undergraduate class. "Renascence" became a sensation through not winning a poetry prize (the protests on Millay's behalf probably attracted more attention than nabbing first prize would have), and once out of college she moved to Greenwich Village to revel in one of the neighborhood's bohemian heydays.

There she wrote, acted in plays and consorted with other writers and artists -- "consorted" being a particularly appropriate word. She was invariably conducting several affairs at once, sometimes sleeping with three men in the same day, and driving all of them to distraction. Both biographies quote from dozens of letters whining, pleading and groveling for her favors. Wilson recollected that falling in love with her "was so common an experience, so almost inevitable a consequence of knowing her in those days." During this period, Cora (who, with her other two daughters, had soon moved to the city to live with Edna) once asked Norma, "Who is Edna killing now? Is he almost done for?"

Next page: A life of impudent abandon