Books by Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Modern Library Torchbearers)

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

An indispensable collection of the groundbreaking poet’s most masterful and innovative work, celebrating a bold early voice of female liberation, independence, and queer sexuality—featuring a new introduction by poet Olivia Gatwood, author of Life of the Party

Edna St. Vincent Millay defined a generation as one of the most critically acclaimed poets of the Modernist era. Her work pushed boundaries within the literary canon for its lyrical expression of female embodiment and progressive feminist politics, and she was honored as only the third woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay demonstrates Millay’s legacy and influence on contemporary poetry. Sometimes satirical, often sharp, and always striking, the poems in this collection span Millay’s remarkable career, from the success of Renascence and Other Poems to the sting of A Few Figs from Thistles, and Second April, as well as “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver” and eight sonnets from the early twenties. Millay’s incandescent poetry continues to inspire today as broadly and deeply as during her lifetime.

The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.

AMERICAN INDIAN STORIES • THE AWAKENING • THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY • THE HEADS OF CERBERUS • LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET • LOVE, ANGER, MADNESS • PASSING • THE TRANSFORMATION OF PHILIP JETTAN • VILLETTE • THERE IS CONFUSION • THE SELECTED POEMS OF EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

Renascence and Other Poems (Dover Thrift Editions)

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

The poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) have been long admired for the lyric beauty that is especially characteristic of her early works. "Renascence," the first of her poems to bring her public acclaim, was written when she was nineteen. Now one of the best-known American poems, it is a fervent and moving account of spiritual rebirth.
In 1917, "Renascence" was incorporated into her first volume of poetry, which is reprinted here, complete and unabridged, from the original edition. The 23 works in this first volume are fired with the romantic and independent spirit of youth that Edna St. Vincent Millay came to personify. In addition to "Renascence," this volume includes 16 other early lyric poems — "Interim," "Sorrow," "Ashes of Life," "Three Songs of Shattering," "The Dream," "When the Year Grows Old," and others, including six sonnets, to which Millay brought great distinction throughout her career.

SEL POEMS (Perennial Classics)

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

A magnificent anthology of the finest works of Edna St. Vincent Millay, perhaps the premier American lyricist of the twentieth century.

Collected Poems

by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies

All the poems of a great 20th-century poet.

From the astonishing debut Hawk in the Rain (1957) to Birthday Letters (1998), Ted Hughes was one of postwar literature's truly prodigious poets. This remarkable volume gathers all of his work, from his earliest poems (published only in journals) through the ground-breaking volumes Crow (1970), Gaudete(1977), and Tales from Ovid (1997). It includes poems Hughes composed for fine-press printers, poems he wrote as England's Poet Laureate, and those children's poems that he meant for adults as well. This omnium-gatherum of Hughes's work is animated throughout by a voice that, as Seamus Heaney remarked, was simply "longer and deeper and rougher" than those of his contemporaries.

Collected Poems

by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies

“Careful, attentive, sometimes consoling, heartbreaking or plangent where no consolation can be found.” ―Stephanie Burt, New York Times Book Review

A monumental celebration of “one of the most significant poets writing today” (David Baker, Los Angeles Review of Books).
In eight extraordinary volumes spanning five decades, Ellen Bryant Voigt has created a body of work distinguished by its formal precision, rigorous intelligence, and meticulous observation of nature, history, and domestic life. From the subtly evocative images of Claiming Kin (1976) to the mosaic of sonnets and voices conjuring a prescient narrative of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Kyrie (1995) to fierce encounters with mortality in the National Book Award finalist Shadow of Heaven (2002) and the propulsive inventions of Headwaters (2013), the evolution of Voigt’s astonishing creative and technical mastery is on full display. This definitive collection showcases the brilliant career of “a quintessential American elegist” (Katy Didden, Kenyon Review). From “Apple Tree”

O my soul,
it is not a small thing,
to have made from three,
this one, this one life.

Collected Poems

by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies

“One of the greatest American poets of her time.”—New York Times
Collected Poems features Edna St. Vincent Millay’s incisive and impassioned poetry and sonnets, as well as the poet’s last volume, Mine the Harvest, compiled and published in 1956 by her sister Norma Millay. Alongside Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and E. E. Cummings, Millay remains among the most celebrated poets of the early twentieth century for her uniquely lyrical explorations of love, individuality, and artistic expression.
Millay, winner in 1923 of the second annual Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a daring, versatile writer whose work includes plays, essays, short stories, and songs. She infused new life into traditional poetic forms, bringing hope to a generation of youth disillusioned by the political and social upheaval of the First World War. She ventured fearlessly beyond familiar poetic subjects to tackle political injustice, social discrimination, and women’s sexuality in her poems and prose.
Yet Millay’s poetry is still decisively modern in its message, and it continues to resonate with readers facing personal and moral issues that defy the test of time: romantic love, loss, betrayal, compassion for one another, social equality, patriotism, and the stewardship of the natural world.
This invaluable compendium of her work is not only an essential addition to any collection of the world’s most moving and memorable poetry but an unprecedented look into the life of Millay.
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
“First Fig” from A Few Figs from Thistles (1920)

Collected Poems

by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies

Gathered in this volume readers will find more than fifty years of poems by the incomparable Jack Gilbert, from his Yale Younger Poets prize-winning volume to glorious late poems, including a section of previously uncollected work.

There is no one quite like Jack Gilbert in postwar American poetry. After garnering early acclaim with Views of Jeopardy (1962), he escaped to Europe and lived apart from the literary establishment, honing his uniquely fierce, declarative style, with its surprising abundance of feeling. He reappeared in our midst with Monolithos (1982) and then went underground again until The Great Fires (1994), which was eventually followed by Refusing Heaven (2005), a prizewinning volume of surpassing joy and sorrow, and the elegiac The Dance Most of All (2009). Whether his subject is his boyhood in working-class Pittsburgh, the women he has loved throughout his life, or the bittersweet losses we all face, Gilbert is by turns subtle and majestic: he steals up on the odd moment of grace; he rises to crescendos of emotion. At every turn, he illuminates the basic joys of everyday experience.

Now, for the first time, we have all of Jack Gilbert’s work in one essential volume: testament to a stunning career and to his place at the forefront of poetic achievement in our time.

Collected Poems

by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies

One of the best-known and best-loved poets of the English-speaking world, Philip Larkin had only a small number of poems published during his lifetime. Collected Poems brings together not only all his books--The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows--but also his uncollected poems from 1940 to 1984.

This new edition reflects Larkin's own ordering for his poems and is the first collection to present the body of his work with the organization he preferred. Preserving everything he published in his lifetime, the new Collected Poems is an indispensable contribution to the legacy of an icon of twentieth-century poetry.

Collected Poems

by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies

Frank Bidart and David Gewanter have compiled the definitive edition of Robert Lowell's work, from his first, impossible-to-find collection, Land of Unlikeness; to the early triumph of Lord Weary's Castle, winner of the 1946 Pulitzer Prize; to the brilliant willfulness of his versions of poems by Sappho, Baudelaire, Rilke, Montale, and other masters in Imitations; to the late spontaneity of The Dolphin, winner of another Pulitzer Prize; to his last, most searching book, Day by Day. This volume also includes poems and translations never previously collected, and a selection of drafts that demonstrate the poet's constant drive to reimagine his work. Collected Poems at last offers readers the opportunity to take in, in its entirety, one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry.

Collected Poems

by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies

The publication of James Merrill's Collected Poems is a landmark in the history of modern American literature. His First Poems—its sophistication and virtuosity were recognized at once—appeared half a century ago. Over the next five decades, Merrill's range broadened and his voice took on its characteristic richness. In book after book, his urbanity and wit, his intriguing images and paradoxes, shone with a rare brilliance. As he once told an interviewer, he "looked for English in its billiard-table sense—words that have been set spinning against their own gravity." But beneath their surface glamour, his poems were driven by an audacious imagination that continually sought to deepen and refine our perspectives on experience. Among other roles, he was one of the supreme love poets of the twentieth century. In delicate lyric or complex narrative, this book abounds with what he once called his "chronicles of love and loss." Like Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden before him, Merrill sought to quicken the pulse of a poem in surprising and compelling ways—ways, indeed, that changed how we came to see our own lives. Years ago, the critic Helen Vendler spoke for others when she wrote of Merrill, "The time eventually comes, in a good poet's career, when readers actively wait for his books: to know that someone out there is writing down your century, your generation, your language, your life . . . He has become one of our indispensable poets."

This book brings together a remarkable body of work in an authoritative edition. From Merrill's privately printed book, The Black Swan, published in 1946, to his posthumous collection, A Scattering of Salts, which appeared in 1995, all of the poems he published are included, except for juvenalia and his epic, The Changing Light at Sandover. In addition, twenty-one of his translations (from Apollinaire, Montale, and Cavafy, among others) and forty-four of his previously uncollected poems (including those written in the last year of his life) are gathered here for the first time.

Collected Poems in the first volume in a series that will present all of James Merrill's work—his novels and plays, and his collected prose. Together, these volumes will testify to a monumental career that distinguished American literature in the late twentieth century and will continue to inspire readers and writers for years to come.

From the Hardcover edition.

Collected Poems

by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies

Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award

Gathered here is a half century’s magnificent work by the former poet laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner whose haunting and exemplary style has influenced an entire generation of American poets.

Beginning with the limited-edition volume Sleeping with One Eye Open, published in 1964, Mark Strand was hailed as a poet of piercing originality and elegance, and in the ensuing decades he has not swerved from his vision of how a poem should be shaped and what it should deliver. As he entered the middle period of his career, with volumes such as The Continuous Life (1990), Strand was already well-known for his ability to capture the subtle music of consciousness, and for creating painterly physical landscapes that could answer to the inner self: “And here the dark infinitive to feel, / Which would endure and have the earth be still / And the star-strewn night pour down the mountains / Into the hissing fields and silent towns.” In his later work, from Blizzard of One (1998) which won the Pulitzer Prize, through the sly, provocative riddles of his recent Almost Invisible (2012), Strand has delighted in reminding us that there is no poet quite like him for a dose of dark wit that turns out to be deep wisdom and self-deprecation. He has given voice to our collective imagination with a grandeur and comic honesty worthy of his great Knopf forebear Wallace Stevens. With this volume, we celebrate his canonical work.

Collected Poems

by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies

William Blake is a poet without parallel, who remains a source of wisdom and inspiration to countless individuals throughout the world.
This selection was commissioned in 1905 by the firm of George Routledge from W.B. Yeats, who had previously been one of the pioneer editors of Blake's prophetic books. Yeats, one of the few poets whose work could be compared with that of Blake, prepared a unique selection of his poetic and prose writings. There is no better way to encounter the work of one poetic genius than as it is presented by another, and Yeats understood Blake in a way few others did.

Collected Poems

by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies

A compelling anthology of poetry, translations, and composition notes by the author of The Book of Illusions features selections from Spokes, Wall Writing, Disappearances, Effigies, White Spaces, and other works, along with biographical details and the author's own thoughts on his writing.

Collected Poems

by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies

None

Collected Poems

by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies

The definitive collection of poems from Pulitzer Prize winner, MacArthur Fellow, and National Book Award winner Galway Kinnell.

“It’s the poet’s job to figure out what’s happening within oneself, to figure out the connection between the self and the world, and to get it down in words that have a certain shape, that have a chance of lasting.” —Galway Kinnell
This long-awaited volume brings together for the first time the life’s work of a major American voice.

In a remarkable generation of poets, Galway Kinnell was an acknowledged, true master. From the book-length poem memorializing the grit, beauty, and swarming assertion of immigrant life along a lower Manhattan avenue, to searing poems of human conflict and war, to incandescent reflections on love, family, and the natural world—including "Blackberry Eating,” "St. Francis and the Sow," and “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps”—to the unflinchingly introspective poems of his later life, Kinnell’s work lastingly shaped the consciousness of his age.

Spanning 65 years of intense, inspired creativity, this volume, with its inclusion of previously uncollected poems, is the essential collection for old and new devotees of a “poet of the rarest ability . . . who can flesh out music, raise the spirits, and break the heart.” (Boston Globe)

Collected Poems

by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies

The life’s work of “one of the true master poets of his generation,”* whose poetry helped shape the consciousness of an age

For Galway Kinnell, it was “the poet’s job to figure out what’s happening within oneself, to figure out the connection between the self and the world, and to get it down in words that have a lasting shape, that have a chance of lasting.” This comprehensive volume includes “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World,” Kinnell’s stunning poem of immigrant life on the Lower East Side of New York, the incantatory book-length poem The Book of Nightmares, the searing evocation of Hiroshima in “The Fundamental Project of Technology,” the iconic themes of his middle years—eros, family, the natural world (“After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” “The Bear,” “Saint Francis and the Sow,” “Blackberry Eating”)—and the unflinchingly introspective work of his later years. Spanning six decades, this is the essential collection for old and new devotees of “a poet of the rarest ability . . . who can flesh out music, raise the spirits, and break the heart.”**

*New York Times
**Boston Globe

Collected Poems

by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies

Jane Kenyon is considered one of America's best contemporary poets. Her previous collection, Otherwise: New & Selected Poems, published just after her death in 1995, has been a favorite among readers, with over 60,000 copies in print, and is a contemporary classic.
Now at the ten-year anniversary of her death, Kenyon's Collected Poems assembles all of her published poetry in one book. Included here are the complete poems found in her four previous volumes--From Room to Room, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening Come, and Constance--as well as the poems that appear in her posthumous volumes Otherwise and A Hundred White Daffodils, four poems never before published in book form, and her translations in Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova.

Collected Poems

by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Strand, William Blake, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell, W. H. Davies

All of Jane Kenyon's published poems gathered in one definitive collection, now in paperback

Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the body:
what else could it do?
―from "Twilight: After Haying"

Jane Kenyon is one of America's most prized contemporary poets. Her previous collection, Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, published just after her death in 1995, has been a favorite among readers, with more than 80,000 copies in print, and is a contemporary classic.

Collected Poems assembles all of Kenyon's published poetry in one book. Included here are the complete poems found in her four previous volumes―From Room to Room, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening Come, and Constance―as well as the poems that appear in her posthumous volumes Otherwise and A Hundred White Daffodils, four poems never before published in book form, and her translations in Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova.

Selected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay: An Annotated Edition

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

This beautifully produced first annotated edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s oeuvre re-presents the work of the Jazz Age’s most famous poet

More than sixty years after her death, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay continues to captivate new generations of readers. The twentieth-century American author was catapulted to fame after the publication of Renascence, her first major work and a poem written while she was still a teenager. Millay’s frank attitude toward sexuality—along with immortal lines such as “My candle burns at both ends”—solidified her reputation as the quintessential liberated woman of the Jazz Age.

In this authoritative volume, Timothy F. Jackson has compiled and annotated a new selection that represents the full range of her published work alongside previously unpublished manuscript excerpts, poems, prose, and correspondence. The poems, appearing as they were printed in their first editions, are complemented by Jackson’s extensive, illuminating notes that draw on archival sources and help situate her work in its historical and literary context. Two introductory essays—one by Jackson and the other by Millay’s literary executor, Holly Peppe—also help critically frame the poet’s work.

This deluxe edition will be cherished by readers who continue to study and enjoy the work of this iconic figure.

Selected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay: An Annotated Edition

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

This beautifully produced first annotated edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s oeuvre re-presents the work of the Jazz Age’s most famous poet

More than sixty years after her death, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay continues to captivate new generations of readers. The twentieth-century American author was catapulted to fame after the publication of Renascence, her first major work and a poem written while she was still a teenager. Millay’s frank attitude toward sexuality—along with immortal lines such as “My candle burns at both ends”—solidified her reputation as the quintessential liberated woman of the Jazz Age.

In this authoritative volume, Timothy F. Jackson has compiled and annotated a new selection that represents the full range of her published work alongside previously unpublished manuscript excerpts, poems, prose, and correspondence. The poems, appearing as they were printed in their first editions, are complemented by Jackson’s extensive, illuminating notes that draw on archival sources and help situate her work in its historical and literary context. Two introductory essays—one by Jackson and the other by Millay’s literary executor, Holly Peppe—also help critically frame the poet’s work.

This deluxe edition will be cherished by readers who continue to study and enjoy the work of this iconic figure.

Millay: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

One of America’s most beloved poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay burst onto the literary scene at a very young age and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923. Her passionate lyrics and superbly crafted sonnets have thrilled generations of readers long after the notoriously bohemian lifestyle she led in Greenwich Village in the 1920s ceased to shock them. Millay’s refreshing frankness and cynicism and her ardent appetite for life still burn brightly on the page more than half a century after her death.

This volume includes the early poems that many consider her best— “Renascence” and “The Ballad of the Harp Weaver” among them—as well as such often-memorized favorites as “What lips my lips have kissed” and “First Fig” (“My candle burns at both ends . . .”). The poet’s most famous verse drama, the one-act antiwar fable Aria da Capo, is included here as well.

Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

This new addition to the elegant Library of Classic Poets series features selections from one of the best-loved poets of the early twentieth century. Elegantly packaged in a handsome edition with a satin ribbon marker, this volume is the perfect addition to any poetry library. Immerse yourself in the candid verse of Edna St. Vincent Millay, including such favorites as:

• "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver"
• "Renascence"
• selections from A Few Figs from Thistles

White Teeth, Red Blood: Selected Vampiric Verses

by Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ishmael Reed, Charles Baudelaire, Lord Byron

SEDUCTIVE, SINISTER, GLAMOROUS, HORRIFIC: this collection brings together the best poems inspired by the undead, from Goethe and Byron to Emily Dickinson and Ishmael Reed

A nest of vampires literal and metaphorical, this poetry collection ranges across centuries and languages to bring readers a bevy of dark delights.

The undead have long provided the perfect vessel for humanity's fears and desires—from spine-tingling chills to sinister sexiness, vampires are the ultimate representation of the most frightening and alluring parts of ourselves. They've inspired poems that tell stories, proffer warnings, and imagine life from inside the eternal night, by authors like J.W. Goethe, Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson, Charles Baudelaire, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Delmira Agustini, and Ishmael Reed, brought together with many more in this one-of-a-kind collection.

With an introduction by Claire Kohda, author of Woman, Eating.

Contents include:
CHILLING TALES: poems by Gottfried August Burger, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Robert Southey, Anne Bannerman ("The Dark Ladie"), John Stagg ("The Vampyre"), Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Rafael Campo DIRE WARNINGS: poems by Heinrich August Ossenfelder ("The Vampire"), John Keats, Henry Thomas Liddell ("The Vampire Bride"), James Clerk Maxwell, Charles Baudelaire, Christina Rossetti, Madison Julius Cawein, Rudyard Kipling, Conrad Aiken, Edna St Vincent Millay ("The Witch-Wife"), James Weldon Johnson THE VAMPIRE WITHIN: poems by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Emily Brontë ("Ah! Why, Because the Dazzling Sun"), Emily Dickinson ("A Death blow is a Life blow to Some [816]"), Walter Pater, Delmira Agustini, William Butler Yeats ("Oil and Blood"), Ishmael Reed ("I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra"), Dorothy Barresi ("Pocket Vampire"), John Yau

Early Poems (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Holly Peppe

Millay's first three books of lyrics and sonnets are collected here: Renascence, Second April, and A Few Figs from Thistles. With a balanced and appreciative introduction and useful annotations, this volume presents some of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's best work in which she weaves intellect, emotion, and irony.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Afternoon on a Hill

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

In this whimsically illustrated board book, a poem expresses the joys of being out in the natural world as "the gladdest thing under the sun."

Wild Nights Heart Wisdom from Five Women Poets

by Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sappho, Sara Teasdale, Amy Lowell

"A lovely collection of poetry." — Book Scrounger

In this soul-stirring collection of timeless verse, five legendary female poets address life's pains and sorrows as well as its joys and renewals. The poems appeal to the heart, providing companionship on the rugged path that all must tread. The roster features writers from ancient to modern times: Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
As instapoets continue to make poetry more accessible and popular, they build on the tradition of intimate, confessional works built by earlier generations. No one is more prominent at this heritage than the mysterious, evocative fragments of Sappho, which inspired an earlier generation of female poets to let loose their own talent. From idiosyncratic Dickinson to the passionate, Pulitzer Prize–winning Lowell, the romanticism of Teasdale, and the intense art of St. Vincent Millay — yet another Pulitzer winner — these writers were early trailblazers in speaking their emotional truth through their craft.
This handsome volume features original illustrations by Claire Whitmore, a Foreword by poet and novelist Lisa Locascio, and brief biographies of all five poets.

"The foreword is amazing. A lovely little anthology with some beautiful poetry by some very talented women." — From the Inside

Edna St. Vincent Millay - Aria Da Capo "Please Give Me Some Good Advice in Your Next Letter. I Promise Not to Follow It"

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born on 22nd February 1892 in Rockland, Maine, the eldest of three daughters.

Her early years were tinted with much difficulty; divorced parents, poverty and a constant change of location.

Despite this once settled in Camden, Maine Edna developed her literary talents at a furious rate. By 15, she had published her poetry in the popular children's magazine St. Nicholas, the Camden Herald, and the high-profile anthology Current Literature.

In 1912, at 20, she entered her poem 'Renascence' in The Lyric Year poetry contest. Despite being considered the best poem it was only given fourth place. The ensuing uproar brought publicity and the offer of funding for her education at Vassar College. Here she wrote, both verse and plays as well as embarking on a series of affairs with women as she explored the wider world and all it offered.

Edna achieved significant fame when she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923 for 'The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver'. It was a magnificent triumph.

She married Eugen Jan Boissevain but on her wedding day she fell ill and he drove her to Manhattan for emergency surgery. He nursed her back to health with remarkable devotion. They were together, in an open marriage, until his death in 1949.

In the summer of 1936, Edna was riding in a station wagon when the door swung open and she was hurled into the pitch-darkness and rolled into a rocky gully. She survived but with severely damaged nerves in her spine and was to live the rest of her life in pain.

In 1942 in an article for The New York Times Magazine, Edna mourned the callous destruction of the Czechoslovak town of Lidice by Nazi forces in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. The article would serve as the basis of her 32-page poem, 'Murder of Lidice' in 1942.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, after suffering a heart attack, fell down the stairs and died at her home on 19th October 1950. She was 58 years old.