In 1992 or 93 I spent hours inside Browsers Bookstore in Olympia, as I usually did. There wasn't anything new in the Drama section, and I already had everything written by Kipling, Plath and Poe from the Poetry section. (There wasn't any Robert Frost available, I wouldn't have his definitive collection for almost a decade.)
I found a play called Two Slatterns and a King by Edna St. Vincent Millay and couldn't put it down. The inside cover told me I could have it for $2, but when I brought it to the counter the college girl working the register said I looked at the wrong spot and that it was actually $20. I wanted it, but not that badly.
So instead I went to the Fireside Bookstore under the Urban Onion and ordered her Collected Works.
The trouble with reading an entire collection from a poet is...well, imagine listening to every last recorded work of your favorite singer in one sitting. The more prolific artists have enough songs to last for days on end without a break. It's always preferable to go an album at a time, assuming that the album as a whole is any good. Many times it's a song or two that you like. The same can be said of a book containing over 1500 poems, many of them forgetable.
There is, however, the kind of album where you can listen to the entire thing at once and enjoy the experience, yet be bored or indifferent to many songs in the middle should they have been played singly. Small collections of poetry, usually published in their first run, is capable of this. Edna St. Vincent Millay's first collection Renascence and Other Poems succeeds in 17 poems and 6 sonnets.
Millay was born in Saucyave's state of Maine in 1892, one of three sisters. Her Mother kicked the Old Man out of the house before the turn of the century and raised her girls alone, stressing self-sufficiency and an education in music and literature.
At age 20 she submitted Renascence to a contest and came in fourth place. It's subsequent publication in The Lyric Year brought her recognition and a scholarship to Vassar. When she graduated at age 25 Renascence and Other Poems was published.
So what is it about this maiden collection I like? Hell, I don't know. It's like Art: I don't know shit about it, I just know what I like. The first three poems (Renascence, Interim and The Suicide) are the longest and pretty much the only ones I liked on their own. They focus on our insignificance in respect to the grand scheme of the universe with thoughts on how to deal with it. The rest speak of roses and Winter and God and other such Vassar crap.
She moved to Greenwich, lived as a Bohemian, won the Pulitzer at 31, married into an open relationship (good plan, seeing as how she was bi), and died at 58...being found on her staircase with a glass of wine.
What good is all this? Well...I suppose one could impress the kids at college with this. Perhaps put on an air of pretentiousness (fitting that she should be an ivy-league New Englander.) I must say Millay is more palatable than Plath (Who, with Cut and Daddy as her only great works, is the most over-blown suicide in literature.)
I like it, okay? At least I'm not posting Sonnets.
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