Collected Sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay

She and her two sisters were raised by an independent woman they adored (“Dearest Mumbles” in her letters) who divorced their father and supported them by being a nurse. Vincent Millay (named for the hospital where her uncle’s life was saved) insisted on being called Vincent. She embodied all of it.Īs a child, Edna St. I found her life to be a blueprint for how to fully engage in the literary world I aspired to, and what it would demand: courage, confidence, mastery, anarchy, and appetite. Millay was not simply a voice for female sexuality and freedom. Rifkin kindly said I even looked like her. Not many understood except our beloved English teacher, Ted Rifkin, who showed me a textbook with the famous Arnold Genthe photograph of Millay among the magnolia blossoms at Vassar. Two years later in freshman year at college, everything would go to hell, but for now I was living with my parents, walled up like a prisoner inside their “middle-class values.” All I could do to express my frustration was to go around dramatically reciting revolutionary verse. I heard what Millay was saying, in a rebellious, free-spirited voice. They dug quantum theory, but poetry was my language. In the Bronx High School of Science, a school of National Merit Scholars and future M.D.s, I was one of the few “creative” types.

This was authoritative, like Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare, who we were studying. We’d practically sworn to remain virgins until we were married, and anyone who wasn’t was a tramp.īut this was poetry. Understand this was 1965, when girls were not permitted to wear pants to public school, and we’d be sent home if our skirts were half an inch above the knee. We knew nothing about our anatomy and heard only horror stories about the other. It was contrary to everything we believed. Sex for the sake of sex? There is such a thing as female satisfaction? Whether or not we find what we are seeking

You mean we had a choice? We didn’t have to wait by the phone, or freak out in the high school corridors, obsessing over signs and signals from the male sex as to our worthiness? We could just toss all of that to the winds? Your little month, your little half a year, So make the most of this, your little day, Not only that, in another poem it was clear that she didn’t give a damn about the boy-girl conventions we’d grown up with: basically that girls were not allowed to initiate a date, or much of anything:

This was a woman talking about sex with a capital “S,” no bones about it. While taking off my coat in her bedroom, I spotted a thin paperback in the light on the nightstand, The Collected Sonnets of Edna St. It was after school and I was visiting my friend, Carolyn, to beg for help with math, at which I was hopeless. I got off the bus in a strange neighborhood, a winter afternoon and already dark.

Collected Sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay