With the recent events of economic crisis, feminist derision and political collision, globalization and every other celebrity being carted off to rehab, whose voice from the past can guide us through the darkness, help us find solace and inspiration in this time of terror and turpitude? How about a jazz-age poet from New England with lesbian tendencies and a pretty serious drug habit? Kind of a Lindsay Lohan/Rush Limbaugh love child, if you will.

We'd like to introduce the pint-sized, auburn-haired figure of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Somewhat perplexingly, her voice speaks volumes to this generation’s crisis of opportunity. While her poetry may have been overlooked in our standard English curriculum in favor of the likes of e.e. cummings, T.S. Eliot, and other champions of non-rhyming free verse, Millay’s most famous lines were the calling card of her generation:

My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and ah, my friends─ It gives a lovely light!

Somewhat the rallying cry of any young professional looking for a happy hour at the end of a 10-hour workday, no?

Romantically, she was initially known for her lesbian love affairs, the joys of which she daringly published in verse form. When she finally started seeing men, she gained a reputation for promiscuity, writing:

I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day…

Edna St. Vincent Millay just isn’t that into you, is she?

Post contributed by MacDuff Stewart, who will be introducing Bostonist to forgotten and overlooked literary voices.
Library of Congress image of Edna St. Vincent Millay in the public domain.

Millay herself would scoff at the sexcapades and drug habits of today’s starlets, as well. The willing partner in a very open marriage, Millay carried on a twenty-year affair to the poet George Dillon, who often stayed with Millay and her husband Eugen Boissevain at their home in upstate New York. After an automobile accident left her with nerve damage in her upper back, she acquired a morphine habit (among others) that at its worst had her injecting the drug into her body eighteen times a day. The grocery bill for a 30-day, private vacation that she and Eugen spent in Tortolla listed common items such as salt, potatoes, and sugar, as well as twenty-eight bottles of whiskey, gin, and vermouth, as well as a case and a half of beer. Quite the bender for the happy couple. By her own admission, Millay’s daily routine looked something like: Wake up, morphine, beer, beer, morphine, gin rickey, manhattan, gin rickey, lunch. She was still putting out bestsellers at her publisher’s request, despite the fact that her husband was forced to type them for her. In one letter to Dillon, she confesses:

I don’t know what kind of depressed, drunken, insane letter I wrote you, but I can well imagine, because I haven’t heard from you─I haven’t heard from you at all.

Think of this letter the next time you find yourself sending a drunken text message after a happy hour where you’ve declared your candle to be burning brightly. While you may have simply sent out an ill-advised text message or email, Millay was writing letters and posting them before she realized what she was doing. Imagine the morning after regret.

As Americans became aware of the reality of Hitler's Germany and began considering the possibility of international warfare, Millay abandoned her pacifist, bohemian identity and became a champion of democracy and staunch critic of isolationism. Her attempts to put her political feelings into lyric poetry were criticized as veiled propaganda, but editions of her poetry sold some 30,000 copies within the first seven months of printing. This is a staggering amount, even by today’s standards.

Millay’s story has an unhappy ending to it; she fell to her death down a flight of stairs in October of 1950. She had been writing late one night on her balcony, smoking a cigarette and finishing a bottle of wine when she either tripped on her dressing gown, or simply let herself fall. But we remember her today, especially in this area, as a daughter of New England who lived as close to Boston as Newburyport and wrote about the shores of Lynn. Her voice has perhaps been overlooked today because she chose to write in sonnet and lyric form, rhyming when the world chose not to, and maybe for being a bit too much of a promiscuous exhibitionist when the world was most comfortable with June Cleaver prototypes. But today, with the Lindsays and Newts and every other so-and-so telling us how we should be living, we can look to this one woman and how she chose to ignore convention and find her own drum.