BIRTH | Feb. 22, Edna St Vincent Millay

Eugen Boissevain and Millay (1923-1949),
at sea.

Edna St Vincent Millay

Wrote poems that paid her way.

Though no longer so treasured today,

For mourners, her poems show the way.

Clerihew by JT Marlin.

On this day in 1892, the poet later known as Edna St. Vincent Millay was born "between the mountains and the sea" in Rockland, Maine. 

She was named Edna Vincent Millay by her mother, a nurse and not a poet.

Millay's name was originally three spondees (a plodding long-long meter). Edna was known as "Vincent" as a child, and enjoyed the excuse to be a tomboy. She was given the name because of St Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village. Millay added "St" to the middle name to make her name into two elegant dactyls (long-short-short) and a truncated spondee.

One of three daughters of a divorced mother, Millay learned from her mother independence and self-reliance. She began publishing poetry in high school. 

When Millay was 19, her mother saw a poetry contest in a magazine called The Lyric Year and encouraged Millay to enter. In 1912, the year she turned 20, her poem “Renascence” appeared in it. Her poem, "Renascence," came in fourth, but the second-prize winner offered her his $250 prize. Millay drew the attention of a benefactor, Caroline Dow, who made it possible for Millay to attend Vassar. She wore men's clothes, wrote and starred in a play called The Princess Marries the Page. The year she graduated, in 1917, her first volume of poetry, Renascence and Other Poems, appeared.

Millay headed to Greenwich Village after graduation, just in time for the Jazz Age. She said: "People fall in love with me and annoy me and distress me and flatter me and excite me." Millay lived a glamorous life as a writer and actress in Greenwich Village. She was one of the first women to write openly about her many lovers. She never, however, seems to have been tempted to leave the caring arms of her husband Eugen.

For a while she lived at 75½ Bedford Street, a house that is just eight feet wide, the narrowest house in New York City, known now as "The Millay House." 

Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (1923) for her book, The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver. That year she married my mother's uncle Eugen Jan Boissevain, who decided to devote himself to looking after her because she was not well. He was previously married to Inez Milholland in a very different marriage although with both wives he announced in advance that he would forgive them in advance for any affairs they had. Inez died in 1916 and in the next seven years Eugen and his two Dutch brothers became wealthy from importing coffee from Java, then a Dutch colony. 

Eugen bought for Millay a big house in Austerlitz, New York that she called "Steepletop". They built a cabin where she could write and cultivated the gardens. Steepletop has a bathing pool (I have been there) and Millay and her husband enjoyed swimming in the nude. Once a bumblebee alighted on a private part of Eugen's anatomy and in characteristically quick-witted moment Millay quoted from the first line of the song in Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene 1.

She gave readings all over the country that her husband organized in a businesslike way, selling her books and charging fees. She is said to be only one of two people who made a living from her poetry in the 20th century (W. H. Auden was the other).

A passionate advocate of civil liberty, she wrote poems in support of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, anarchists condemned to death for robbery and murder. She was arrested and jailed for protesting their trial. In the 1930s, she wrote anti-totalitarian poetry for newspapers, as well as radio plays and speeches.

Millay died in 1950. Eugen had died the previous year from cancer, and she succumbed to the addictions (alcohol, morphine) that from time to time dominated her life. The Austerlitz postmistress found Millay lifeless at the foot of the stairway at Steepletop. 

A lovely memory of her father by Katherine Vaz calls on several quotations from Edna St. Vincent Millay to feed her melancholy mood. 

The memory is a couple of years old but was just posted on Jennifer Pastiloff's Manifest-Station blog.

http://themanifeststation.net/2015/05/31/gone-to-feed-the-roses/

Perhaps her most famous poem was the short one: "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!" 

Here's another poem: 

Recuerdo

We were very tired, we were very merry— We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable— But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table, We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon; And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came        soon. We were very tired, we were very merry— We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry; And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear, From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere; And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold, And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold We were very tired, we were very merry We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. We hailed, "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-        covered head, And bought a morning paper which neither of us        read; And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and        pears, and we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

XEdna the Queen Bee of Ragged Island (Superseded)

Edna and Eugen - Anemone and The Rock.

Edna St. Vincent Millay and my great-uncle Eugen Boissevain were married in 1923.

Eugen's first wife Inez Milholland died tragically in 1916 and he threw himself into his business importing coffee from Java with his two Dutch brothers Robert and Jan.

It was a good time to buy and sell coffee from Java, and for a while the Boissevain brothers had special access. Eugen became a wealthy man in the postwar years and was able to retire soon after he married.

He wanted to look after Edna, who was constantly sick, and help her manage her literary affairs in a way that would capitalize on her fame and generate income for them both (which became important after 1929). She is said to have been the only female in the 20th century to have made a living from her poetry. (The other poet to have done the same was W. H. Auden. All the other poets had day jobs to put food on the table.)

They (or, more probably, Eugen) purchased the 600-acre property called Steepletop in Austerlitz, N.Y. the year they were married.

Ten years later, they purchased Ragged Island in Casco Bay, Maine. In a previous century it was called Cold Arse Island. My mother, Eugen's niece, had good information about Eugen's activities because Eugen's sister Olga, my Granny, was living with us in Washington, D.C. at the time.

Edna decided that she should be the Queen Bee of Ragged Island, the only female allowed. She told Eugen that he was not to invite any other woman, or allow any other woman, to come on the island. My mother told me that Eugen asked Edna:

"Even Norma?"

Norma was Edna's sister, younger by one year. She did not have Edna's talents, or even the talents of their younger sister Kathleen, but she envied Edna's fame and many friends. Kathleen, who had literary aspirations along Edna's lines, was four years younger than Edna and shared a portion of Edna's literary capability. She was also apparently was less of a clinging vine to Edna than Norma. It was about Kathleen that Edna wrote her famous letter to her mother Cora in which she said that if her sister wanted to publish a book of her poetry, she knew what she was getting in for. Kathleen was a grownup and could do as she damned pleased, she said, foolhardy though it might seem to her mother. Kathleen sadly died at 47 in 1943, seven years before her Edna. Her literary papers are available in four parts at the New York Public Library; in a word, she did not come close to Edna's success. Norma's triumph was to outlive them both.

Edna answered Eugen:

"Especially Norma!"

(My mother told me that Eugen was asked frequently to protect Edna from Norma's threatened visits to Steepletop. Norma surely resented Eugen's being the gatekeeper and on the maps of the Austerlitz "Millay Estate", which Norma occupied after Eugen died in 1949 and Edna in 1950, there is no mention of Eugen. The place where Eugen is buried, next to Edna, was labeled on the maps "The Millay Graves". I hope that the Millay Colony has rectified this erasure of the name of Edna's husband, caretaker and patron. In fairness to Norma, there were many others who resented Eugen. No less a person than Edmund Wilson, in his book on The Twenties, cannot conceal his astonishment that he would be rejected by Edna as spouse material in favor of Eugen, whom he describes as "a Dutch importer". I had the privilege of meeting Mr. Wilson when he was living in Cambridge, Mass. in the early 1960s with Mary McCarthy.)

Ragged Island today is not inhabited, at least year round. It provides habitat for many nesting seabirds, including the eider duck, black guillemot, greater black-backed gull, herring gull and osprey.

It was the subject of a well-regarded 1914 watercolor by John Marin in which the island and the water are juxtaposed in an innovative way that is described as creating "vertigo".

The island when purchased was described as occupying 85 acres. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Coastal Wetlands Conservation Grant program in 2008 awarded a $323,000 Coastal Wetland grant to secure seabird-nesting protection of the 77-acre (310,000 square meters) natural area. So the island has eroded, or the area was measured differently the second time. With all the debris left by the birds, one would expect the island to grow, maybe?

John Felstiner wrote about Steepletop and Ragged Island in The American Poetry Review Vol. 36, No. 3 (May-June 2007), 45-48. "There, there where those black spruces crowd": To Steepletop and Ragged Island with Edna St. Vincent Millay.

My wife Alice and I would like to visit Ragged Island and other haunts of young Edna, and her mother and sisters.