Rapture and Melancholy

January 15, 2022
A candid self-portrait of the "bad girl of American letters." Biographer Epstein offers a judicious edition of the diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), beginning in 1907, when the ebullient teenager felt sometimes overwhelmed with caring for her two younger sisters whenever her mother, a nurse, was called away. "It is very hard to be sixteen," she confides to her diary, glad to have an outlet for what she calls her "spite." At 19, fantasizing about a "beloved," she pours her passion into "Renascence," which she entered into a poetry contest in May 1912. Accepted for a volume of the winners, "Renascence" was singled out for praise by several reviewers and served to launch Millay's career. The Poetry Society of America hosted a literary evening in her honor in 1913, when she was a student at Barnard, preparing to enter college. For the 20-year-old poet, New York City was a heady experience, and her diary reflects the excitement of meeting other poets (Sara Teasdale, for one), shopping, walking through Manhattan, and seeing her first opera, Madame Butterfly, at the Metropolitan Opera House. After graduating from Vassar, she traveled to Europe, including Albania, which had just opened to Western tourism. Her vivid entries from that trip, Epstein notes, appear here for the first time. In 1923, Millay married the wealthy Dutch businessman Eugen Boissevain, widower of suffragist Inez Milholland, and soon the couple bought Steepletop, a house in Austerlitz, New York, where Millay lived for the rest of her life. Entries reveal her as impetuous, hardworking, and passionate; friends could irritate as much as please. A lover's rejection sent her into a depression from which she never recovered. By 1949, when she made her last entry, she had become "a solitary, tragic figure," suffering from ill health, addiction to alcohol and opiates, and loneliness. Authoritative introductions contribute to the literary significance of the diaries.

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March 14, 2022
Dramatist Epstein (The Loyal Son) assembles in this intimate collection the first publication of the diaries of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950). The entries, which cover 1907–1949, offer moving insights into the interior and domestic life of the Pulitzer winner. She wrote her breakthrough poem “Renascence” in 1912, and the diaries capture her reaction to the poem’s success (“Read it and get a life-long swell-head!” she writes about one review), as well as her life at Steepletop, her upstate New York farm, with her husband. Many of the entries are just one line long, but others offer rambling considerations: “Why on earth, pray tell, should I have dreamed last night of velvet... never before, it seems to me, did I dream of velvet.” Epstein’s excellent and concise introductions to the various eras of his subject’s life highlight that though Millay’s diaries coincide with her most mentally stable periods, they also offer a glimpse of a woman addicted to medical morphine and mired in alcoholism: “They are lovely here & give me all the morphine I want—ply me with morphine,” she wrote in 1927 while at Mount Sinai Hospital after an operation. Through it all, Millay comes across as full of life: energetic, intelligent, and vivacious. These entries are a pleasure to read.