Reviews for Savage beauty : the life of Edna St. Vincent Millay
Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Milford hit the New York Times bestseller list 30 years ago with her acclaimed biography of Zelda Fitzgerald; she now seems poised to do it again with this outstanding biography of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Like Fitzgerald, Millay (1892-1950) was a Jazz Age phenomenon, causing a sensation wherever she went; lines from her brief poem, "First Fig" ("I burn my candle at both ends/ It will not last the night... ") would become the rallying cry of a generation. She was notorious for her sexual unconventionality and (as Edmund Wilson put it) "her intoxicating effect on people... of all ages and both sexes." How a lyric poet could have achieved such celebrity is the conundrum at the heart of Savage Beauty. Millay, as Milford depicts her, was a troubled genius who used her prodigious gift to propel herself out of rural poverty and into the center of her age. She carefully cultivated the reporters and patrons who took the "fragile girl-child" under their wing. But her delicate image masked a force of nature whose incendiary wit and insatiable ambition took the public by storm. Milford deftly links the lyric intensity of Millay's work with her ravenous appetite for life. Whether tracing her ghoulishly close relationship to her mother and sisters, her years at the center of cosmopolitan life or her morphine addiction and untimely death, this account offers its readers a haunting drama of artistic fame. A true paradigm of literary biography, this finely crafted book is not to be missed. (Sept. 11) Forecast: Zelda, a finalist for the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, sold 1.4 million copies. In addition to a nine-city author tour and first serial publication in Vanity Fair, Mitford will be interviewed in the September issue of Harper's Bazaar. Expect lots of excellent reviews and return trips to the printer once the 75,000 initial run sells out. Along with this bio, Modern Library will issue a new edition of Millay's poetry, edited by (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
In 1923, Edna St.Vincent Millay (1892-1950) became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for POETRY. To write her biography, Milford whose one other major publication is a highly praised and best-selling biography, Zelda persuaded Millay's younger sister and sole heir, Norma, to give her access to hundreds of Millay's personal papers, letters, and notebooks. Selecting from "this extraordinary collection," Milford meticulously integrates Millay's major poems, letters received and sent, reactions of friends, and comments from extensive interviews with Norma into an orderly and affecting narrative. The result is an intimate look at a complex, charismatic, imperfect woman, someone who evokes both admiration and sympathy. Among the less glamorous revelations are the sometimes damaging intertwining of the poet's life with that of her mother and two sisters, Millay's promiscuity and uncanny seductiveness, and the dynamics of her 27-year marriage to a man who adored and promoted her while enabling her infidelities and addictions. Milford's lengthy portrait is a testimonial to her scholarship, stamina, and commitment to her craft. This should serve as a model of a highly readable biography, as well as a standard source for future Millay studies. Recommended for all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/01.] Carol A. McAllister, Coll. of William & Mary Lib., Williamsburg, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
After 30 years, Milford (Zelda, 1970) returns with another definitive biography of another significant literary figure. The author's prologue describes her intricate choreography with Norma Millay, sister of the poet Edna and possessor of the thousands of documents and other materials Milford eventually came to possess. Throughout, she quotes passages of her conversations with Norma-dialogue so pregnant and peculiar it could have come from The Aspern Papers. In the early chapters, Milford slips back and forth in time to tell the stories of Edna's ancestors and to describe a childhood featuring eccentric and impecunious parents (when the Millays' Maine house flooded one winter, the three sisters ice-skated on the kitchen floor). The poet's mother, Cora, is a character from a Tennessee Williams play-fiercely devoted to her children, a woman who both competed with her talented daughters and gave them their supreme self-confidence. Edna (who first published as "Vincent Millay"-the "St. Vincent" derived from the name of a hospital that had saved an uncle) displayed an early felicity with verse and began publishing in her teens. When she entered Vassar in 1913, she was already a minor celebrity. In college-and throughout much of her life-Edna was a bohemian who smoked, drank, swam nude, and enjoyed sex with both women and men. (Milford does not neglect to give us a paragraph about Millay's discovery of her clitoris and a passage about her pubic hair.) She became an extraordinarily popular poet, selling tens of thousands of copies of her collections, delivering readings in her rich, mellifluous, contralto voice to standing-room-only crowds all over the country. In 1950, however, her elfin beauty destroyed by age, alcohol, drugs, pain, and sorrow, Millay-either accidentally or intentionally (Milford does not speculate)-tumbled down a dark stairway and broke her neck. An essential biography of a unique and important poet-written with lush detail and delicious language, and displaying enormous care, craft, and compassion. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Choice
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Milford (an independent scholar who has taught at Princeton) benefited greatly from access to unpublished materials, such as diaries, notebooks, and letters, and from the complete cooperation of the poet's executor, her sister Norma Millay Ellis. She is thus able to produce a biography more thoroughly detailed than any other. She is revelatory in dealing with Millay's alcoholism and drug addiction. She makes clear Millay's always fragile health and its effect at times on her productivity. And she spells out the poet's romantic involvement with George Dillon, her collaborator in a translation of Beaudelaire's poetry. Further, Milford touches on every aspect of Millay's work in both verse and prose. What emerges is a portrait of a truly remarkable woman who was also a major poet. Joining Jean Gould's worthwhile full-length biography The Poet and Her Book: A Biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay (CH, Dec'69), a straightforward and sensitive account of the poet's life, the present well-informed treatment is recommended for students at the undergraduate and graduate level and for general readers. J. J. Patton emeritus, Atlantic-Cape Community College
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
A reevaluation of Millay is long overdue, and how fitting it is that a poet as famous for her complicated love life as for her extraordinary poems is the subject of rival biographers. Millay scholars were frustrated for decades by the inaccessibility of a vast treasure trove of letters, journals, and other private papers jealously guarded by the poet's sister, Norma. Milford, the author of Zelda (1970), the best-selling biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, gradually earned Norma's trust during the 1970s and now presents the first comprehensive authorized biography of the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Red-headed, green-eyed, precocious, independent, and beguiling, Millay was born in Camden, Maine, in 1892, the eldest of three daughters of a divorced and renegade mother. Millay began writing as a girl, and her brilliant, original, and fearless early poems won her prizes and wealthy patrons who sent her to Vassar, where she conducted a great swirl of love affairs with young women and older men. Once established in Greenwich Village, the indefatigably lascivious Millay wrote daring yet lyric collections that sold in the tens of thousands at the height of the Depression. Milford is both meticulous and dynamic in her assessment of Millay's trailblazing work and complicated, controversial life right up to its sad and dramatic end, and she will continue her reclamation of a great American poet as editor of a forthcoming Modern Library edition of Millay's fire-and-diamond poetry. Epstein, a poet as well as a biographer of such disparate figures as Nat King Cole and the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, takes a more tightly focused and interpretative approach than Milford by, as he explains, "discussing Millay's love life and how the poetry arose from it." He writes with acuity and grace about the young Millay's determination, yearnings, and intellectual spirituality. By homing in on her erotic life (he writes that the poet had a "megawatt libido"), Epstein runs the risk of belittling Millay's extraordinary literary gifts, "vatic" poetic persona, moral passion, and vibrant and courageous life of the mind. Yet his insights into her androgyny, his understanding of just how ahead of her time she was, his placing her in the pantheon with Shelley, Coleridge, and Baudelaire, and his respect for her marriage to the supportive Eugen Boissevain keep him on solid ground. Certain disclosures, particularly of Millay's secret racehorse investments, await further study, but Epstein's keen reading of Millay's poetry and temperament is smart, stirring, and invaluable. Donna Seaman
