Edna St. Vincent Millay

It seems what has provoked this article plus slide show of Steepletop, home of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, where she wrote, lived, loved, kicked a drug dependency and, a year after her beloved husband's death, died, is the planned restoration of the place.

It's not that a study of her work or a new biography has been recently published about this American poet who was regarded as one of the greatest of lyricists, and then, dismissed, as a, well, girl. Her poems have been a life's companion since I first discovered them in the spring of my 9th grade year. I worked at learning to type by re-typing her poems in my unheated bedroom during North Dakota winters. I pressed the flowers brought back from my baby sister's funeral in my Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I recently re-watched Steepletop, the short film about the farm, in which the viewer sees Millay's sister, Nora, attempting to inhabit her sister's life.

The Millay family, and their dynamics, are an American mythic family, like that of the Wyeths, as are the Brontes and the Rossettis in England. The more or less mysterious and convoluted intra-familia dynamics around the larger talents and characters of the public-name members, are of such enduring fascination that they've spawned a meta literature of their own. It's eerie, seeing this dynamic in action, with Nora, in the Steepletop documentary.

The WaPo's Arts & Living magazine / section for Sunday has done an article on Steepletop and Millay, with accompanying slide show. Unlike the documentary film footage of Steepletop, these photographs are in color. It's heartening to see this house, which protected the poet in her darkest times, so brilliantly lit by the warm summer sun.

A Garden of Verses: "Edna St. Vincent Millay's poetry was nurtured by her deep knowledge of the natural world" can be found here. The concluding paragraph:

[ "A man telephoned to ask if he could bring his girlfriend to Steepletop. "She felt she couldn't die without first seeing where Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote," he said. On the appointed date, "there were these kids, he was 24, she was 23, and they were soldiers who had just been assigned to Afghanistan. This is what they wanted to see." ]

Millay is judged a poet who speaks to the young (as if this is a lesser achievement, that goes along with her being a woman who presumed to write poetry, and achieve great success. My own relationship with her work confirms that does speak to the young. Perhaps the first book I ever bought (buying books was not a simple or easy thing out there in rural North Dakota, not even in the big city of Fargo, before the blast of chain book stores) was her Collected Poems. For reasons known only by my heart, it is shelved next to A.S. Byatt's Possession. This is in the small bookcase of essential books that include the likes of Bambi, Louisa May Alcott, Ivanhoe, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Mary Chestnut's Civil War, the medieval Romance cycles of the Matter of Britain, the books of Yoruba Odu, Robert Farris Thompson, Lincoln Kirstein's history of theatrical dance.

But as one inevitably gets older, one's relationships with what pre-occupied one's younger decades change. It seems that Millay speaks to that change of maturing life as clearly as she does to the more youthful preoccupied celebrations of romance, eros and the passionate dream of justice for one and all. Considering what her last works were, in condemnation of the nazis in Europe, her contemptuous passion for those who destroy in their quest for political / economic power, that passion did not, does not, fade.