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76-577: Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 – October 19, 1950) was an American lyrical poet and playwright. Millay was a renowned social figure and noted feminist in New York City during the Roaring Twenties and beyond. She wrote much of her prose and hackwork verse under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd . Millay won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her poem " Ballad of the Harp-Weaver "; she

152-406: A heart attack following a coronary occlusion . She is buried alongside her husband at Steepletop, Austerlitz, New York. After her death, The New York Times described her as "an idol of the younger generation during the glorious early days of Greenwich Village" and as "one of the greatest American poets of her time." Thomas Hardy said that America had two great attractions: the skyscraper and

228-647: A collection of Millay's poems called The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Milford would label Millay as "the herald of the New Woman ." A New York Times review of Milford noted that "readers of poetry probably dismiss Millay as mediocre," and noted that within 20 years of Millay's death, "the public was impatient with what had come to seem a poised, genteel emotionalism." However, it concludes that "readers should come away from Milford's book with their understanding of Millay deepened and charged." The New York Review of Books called Milford's biography "the story of

304-403: A custom hair stylist and training nurse for private families, and Henry Tolman Millay, a life insurance agent and teacher who would later become a superintendent of schools. Her middle name derives from St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City, where her uncle's life had been saved from an accident at sea just before her birth. Encouraged to read the classics at home, she was too rebellious to make

380-702: A dedicated and active pacifist ; however, in 1940, she advocated for the U.S. to enter the war against the Axis and became an ardent supporter of the war effort. She later worked with the Writers' War Board to create propaganda , including poetry. Millay's reputation in poetry circles was damaged by her war work. Merle Rubin noted, "She seems to have caught more flak from the literary critics for supporting democracy than Ezra Pound did for championing fascism ." In 1942 in The New York Times Magazine , Millay mourned

456-518: A fictitious relationship between a knight and his high-born lady". Initially imitating the lyrics of the French troubadours and trouvères, minnesang soon established a distinctive tradition. There was also a large body of medieval Galician-Portuguese lyric . Hebrew singer-poets of the Middle Ages included Yehuda Halevi , Solomon ibn Gabirol , and Abraham ibn Ezra . In Italy, Petrarch developed

532-549: A jail was a first a school and then city watchhouse. American lyricist Ira Gershwin was born at 60 Eldridge Street. Musicians Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon of the American rock band Sonic Youth lived at 84 Eldridge Street in the 1980s. 105-107 Eldridge Street was the Eldridge Street Police Station from 1869 to 1912. Danish-American photographer and social reformer Jacob Riis took several photographs of

608-428: A large skylight: "All I could see from where I stood / Was three long mountains and a wood; / I turned and looked another way, / And saw three islands in a bay." The library's Walsh History Center collection contains the scrapbooks created by Millay's high-school friend, Corinne Sawyer, as well as photos, letters, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera. Millay has been referenced in popular culture, and her work has been

684-404: A poem written so that it could be set to music—whether or not it actually was. A poem's particular structure, function, or theme might all vary. The lyric poetry of Europe in this period was created by the pioneers of courtly poetry and courtly love largely without reference to the classical past. The troubadors , travelling composers and performers of songs, began to flourish towards the end of

760-663: A result, Millay was frequently ill and weak for much of the next four years. Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923 for "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver." She was the first woman to win the poetry prize, though two women ( Sara Teasdale in 1918 and Margaret Widdemer in 1919) won special prizes for their poetry prior to the establishment of the award. In 1924, literary critic Harriet Monroe labeled Millay “the greatest woman poet since Sappho ." After experiencing his remarkable attention to her during her illness, she married 43-year-old Eugen Jan Boissevain in 1923. Boissevain

836-587: A rise of lyric poetry during the 18th and early 19th centuries. The Swedish "Phosphorists" were influenced by the Romantic movement and their chief poet Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom produced many lyric poems. Italian lyric poets of the period include Ugo Foscolo , Giacomo Leopardi , Giovanni Pascoli , and Gabriele D'Annunzio . Spanish lyric poets include Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer , Rosalía de Castro , and José de Espronceda . Japanese lyric poets include Taneda Santoka , Masaoka Shiki , and Ishikawa Takuboku . In

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912-484: A stringed instrument known as a kithara , a seven-stringed lyre (hence "lyric"). It is not equivalent to song lyrics, though song lyrics are often in the lyric mode, and it is also not equivalent to Ancient Greek lyric poetry, which was principally limited to song lyrics, or chanted verse. The term owes its importance in literary theory to the division developed by Aristotle among three broad categories of poetry: lyrical, dramatic , and epic . Lyric poetry

988-466: A student 14 years her junior, whom she met in 1928 at one of her readings at the University of Chicago . Their relationship inspired the sonnets in the collection Fatal Interview , which she published in 1931. In 1925, Boissevain and Millay bought Steepletop near Austerlitz, New York , which had once been a 635-acre (257 ha) blueberry farm. They built a barn (from a Sears Roebuck kit), and then

1064-589: A success of formal education, but she won poetry prizes from an early age. Edna's mother attended a Congregational church . In 1904, Cora officially divorced Millay's father for financial irresponsibility and domestic abuse. They had already been separated for some years. Henry and Edna kept a letter correspondence for many years, but he never re-entered the family. Cora and her three daughters – Edna (who called herself "Vincent"), Norma Lounella , and Kathleen Kalloch (born 1896) – moved from town to town, living in poverty and surviving various illnesses. Cora travelled with

1140-530: A trunk full of classic literature, including Shakespeare and Milton , which she read to her children. The family settled in a small house on the property of Cora's aunt in Camden, Maine , where Millay would write the first of the poems that would bring her literary fame. The family's house in Camden was "between the mountains and the sea where baskets of apples and drying herbs on the porch mingled their scents with those of

1216-609: A writing cabin and a tennis court. Millay grew her own vegetables in a small garden. Later, they bought Ragged Island in Casco Bay , Maine, as a summer retreat. Frequently having trouble with the servants they employed, Millay wrote, "The only people I really hate are servants. They are not really human beings at all." Millay was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera House to write a libretto for an opera composed by Deems Taylor . The result, The King's Henchman , drew on

1292-447: Is in many ways both the culmination of medieval courtly love poetry and the beginning of Renaissance love lyric. A bhajan or kirtan is a Hindu devotional song . Bhajans are often simple songs in lyrical language expressing emotions of love for the Divine . Notable authors include Kabir , Surdas , and Tulsidas . Chinese Sanqu poetry was a Chinese poetic genre popular from

1368-596: Is love. Notable authors include Hafiz , Amir Khusro , Auhadi of Maragheh , Alisher Navoi , Obeid e zakani , Khaqani Shirvani , Anvari , Farid al-Din Attar , Omar Khayyam , and Rudaki . The ghazal was introduced to European poetry in the early 19th century by the Germans Schlegel , Von Hammer-Purgstall , and Goethe , who called Hafiz his "twin". Lyric in European literature of the medieval or Renaissance period means

1444-411: Is one of the earliest forms of literature. Much lyric poetry depends on regular meter based either on number of syllables or on stress – with two short syllables typically being exchangeable for one long syllable – which is required for song lyrics in order to match lyrics with interchangeable tunes that followed a standard pattern of rhythm. Although much modern lyric poetry is no longer song lyrics,

1520-594: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 's account of Eadgar, King of Wessex . The opera began its production in 1927 to high praise; The New York Times described it as "the most effectively and artistically wrought American opera that has reached the stage." In August 1927, Millay, along with a number of other writers, was arrested while protesting the impending executions of the Italian American anarchist duo Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti . Due to her status, she

1596-562: The St. Nicholas Gold Badge for poetry, and 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 . Millay's fame began in 1912 when, at the age of 20, she entered her poem " Renascence " in a poetry contest in The Lyric Year . The backer of the contest, Ferdinand P. Earle , chose Millay as

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1672-524: The Black Mountain movement with Robert Creeley , Organic Verse represented by Denise Levertov , Projective verse or "open field" composition as represented by Charles Olson , and also Language Poetry which aimed for extreme minimalism along with numerous other experimental verse movements throughout the remainder of the 20th century, up into today where these questions of what constitutes poetry, lyrical or otherwise, are still being discussed but now in

1748-612: The Cherry Lane Theatre and 75½ Bedford Street , renowned for being the narrowest in New York City. While in New York City, Millay was openly bisexual , developing passing relationships with men and women. The critic Floyd Dell wrote that Millay was "a frivolous young woman, with a brand-new pair of dancing slippers and a mouth like a valentine." She maintained relationships with The Masses editor Floyd Dell and critic Edmund Wilson , both of whom proposed marriage to her and were refused. Counted among Millay's close friends were

1824-576: The Provincetown Players on Macdougal Street and the Theatre Guild . In 1923, Millay and others founded the Cherry Lane Theatre "to continue the staging of experimental drama." During her stay in Greenwich Village, Millay learned to use her poetry for her feminist activism . She often went into detail about topics others found taboo , such as a wife leaving her husband in the middle of

1900-456: The sonnet form pioneered by Giacomo da Lentini and Dante 's Vita Nuova . In 1327, according to the poet, the sight of a woman called Laura in the church of Sainte-Claire d'Avignon awoke in him a lasting passion, celebrated in the Rime sparse ("Scattered rhymes"). Later, Renaissance poets who copied Petrarch's style named this collection of 366 poems Il Canzoniere ("The Song Book"). Laura

1976-489: The sonnet . In France, La Pléiade , a group including Pierre de Ronsard , Joachim du Bellay , and Jean-Antoine de Baïf , aimed to break with earlier traditions of French poetry, particularly Marot and the grands rhétoriqueurs , and began imitating classical Greek and Roman forms such as the ode . Favorite poets of the school were Pindar , Anacreon , Alcaeus , Horace , and Ovid . They also produced Petrarchan sonnet cycles . Spanish devotional poetry adapted

2052-481: The "modest double houses" that made up almost 10% of residences in the largely working-class city between 1837 and the early 1900s. When fully restored by 2023, half the house will be dedicated to honoring Millay's legacy with workshops and classes, while the other half will be rented for income to sustain conservation and programs. A writer-in-residence will be funded by the Ellis Beauregard Foundation and

2128-427: The 11th century and were often imitated in successive centuries. Trouvères were poet-composers who were roughly contemporary with and influenced by the troubadours but who composed their works in the northern dialects of France . The first known trouvère was Chrétien de Troyes ( fl.  1160s–80s). The dominant form of German lyric poetry in the period was the minnesang , "a love lyric based essentially on

2204-471: The 12th-century Jin Dynasty through to the early Ming . Early 14th century playwrights like Ma Zhiyuan and Guan Hanqing were well-established writers of Sanqu. Against the usual tradition of using Classical Chinese , this poetry was composed in the vernacular. In 16th-century Britain, Thomas Campion wrote lute songs and Sir Philip Sidney , Edmund Spenser , and William Shakespeare popularized

2280-487: The 1930s, her declining reputation, constant medical bills, and frequent demands from her mentally ill sister Kathleen meant that for most of her last years, Millay was in debt to her own publisher. Author Daniel Mark Epstein also concludes from her correspondence that Millay developed a passion for thoroughbred horse-racing , and spent much of her income investing in a racing stable of which she had quietly become an owner. Although her work and reputation declined during

2356-551: The 19th century and came to be seen as synonymous with poetry. Romantic lyric poetry consisted of first-person accounts of the thoughts and feelings of a specific moment; the feelings were extreme but personal. The traditional sonnet was revived in Britain, with William Wordsworth writing more sonnets than any other British poet. Other important Romantic lyric writers of the period include Samuel Taylor Coleridge , John Keats , Percy Bysshe Shelley , and Lord Byron . Later in

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2432-519: The American New Criticism returned to the lyric, advocating a poetry that made conventional use of rhyme, meter, and stanzas, and was modestly personal in the lyric tradition. Lyric poetry dealing with relationships, sex, and domestic life constituted the new mainstream of American poetry in the middle of the 20th century, following such movements as the confessional poets of the 1950s and 1960s, who included Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton .

2508-569: The German Romantic revival of the folk-song tradition initiated by Goethe , Herder , and Arnim and Brentano 's Des Knaben Wunderhorn . France also saw a revival of the lyric voice during the 19th century. The lyric became the dominant mode of French poetry during this period. For Walter Benjamin , Charles Baudelaire was the last example of lyric poetry "successful on a mass scale" in Europe. In Russia , Aleksandr Pushkin exemplified

2584-450: The Harp-Weaver" are considered her finest poems. Lyric poetry Modern lyric poetry is a formal type of poetry which expresses personal emotions or feelings, typically spoken in the first person. The term for both modern lyric poetry and modern song lyrics derives from a form of Ancient Greek literature , the Greek lyric , which was defined by its musical accompaniment, usually on

2660-524: The Millay House Rockland. Millay is also memorialized in Camden, Maine , where she lived beginning in 1900. A statue of the poet stands in Harbor Park, which shares with Mt. Battie the view of Penobscot Bay that opens "Renascence", the poem that launched Millay's career. Camden Public Library also shares Mt. Battie's view. It has the first couplets of "Renascence" inscribed along the perimeter of

2736-428: The basis of the 1943 MGM movie Hitler's Madman . Millay was critical of capitalism and sympathetic to socialist ideals, which she labeled as "of a free and equal society", but she did not identify as a communist . She told Grace Hamilton King in 1941 that she had been "almost a fellow-traveller with the communist idea as far as it went along with the socialist idea." Despite the excellent sales of her books in

2812-479: The careers of Millay and Johns. Johns, who was receiving hate mail, conceded that he thought her poem was better. "The award was as much an embarrassment to me as a triumph," he said. Johns did not attend the awards banquet. The second-prize winner offered Millay his $ 250 prize money. In the immediate aftermath of the Lyric Year controversy, wealthy arts patron Caroline B. Dow heard Millay reciting her poetry and playing

2888-537: The century, the Victorian lyric was more linguistically self-conscious and defensive than the Romantic forms had been. Such Victorian lyric poets include Alfred Lord Tennyson and Christina Rossetti . Lyric poetry was popular with the German reading public between 1830 and 1890, as shown in the number of poetry anthologies published in the period. According to Georg Lukács , the verse of Joseph von Eichendorff exemplified

2964-610: The context of hypertext and multimedia as it is used via the Internet. Eldridge Street The Eldridge Street Synagogue at 12 Eldridge Street opened in 1887 and served Congregation Kahal Adath Jeshurun. It is one of the first synagogues in the United States erected by Eastern European Jews (Ashkenazis). Since 2007, the synagogue houses the Museum at Eldridge Street. Eddie Cantor lived at 19 Eldridge Street. 20 Eldridge Street

3040-542: The destruction of the Czech village Lidice . Nazi forces had razed Lidice , slaughtered its male inhabitants and scattered its surviving residents in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich . Millay wrote: "The whole world holds in its arms today / The murdered village of Lidice, / Like the murdered body of a little child." This article would serve as the basis of her 32-page work "Murder of Lidice," published by Harper and Brothers in 1942. The poem loosely served as

3116-503: The earlier years of the 20th century rhymed lyric poetry, usually expressing the feelings of the poet, was the dominant poetic form in the United States, Europe, and the British colonies . The English Georgian poets and their contemporaries such as A. E. Housman , Walter de la Mare , and Edmund Blunden used the lyric form. The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore was praised by William Butler Yeats for his lyric poetry; Yeats compared him to

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3192-419: The house and barn. After the death of her husband in 1976, Norma continued to run the program until her death in 1986. At 17, the poet Mary Oliver visited Steepletop and became a close friend of Norma. She would later live at Steepletop off-and-on for seven years and helped to organize Millay's papers. Mary Oliver herself went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, greatly inspired by Millay's work. In 2006,

3268-418: The inspiration for music and drama: 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) Millay wrote six verse dramas early in her career, including: " Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare " (1922) is an homage to the geometry of Euclid . "Renascence" and "The Ballad of

3344-509: The life that eclipsed the work," and dismissed much of Millay's work as "soggy" and " doggerel ." Millay was named by Equality Forum as one of their "31 Icons" of the 2015 LGBT History Month . Millay's sister Norma and her husband, the painter and actor Charles Frederick Ellis, moved to Steepletop after Millay's death. In 1973, they established the Millay Colony for the Arts on seven acres near

3420-563: The lyric for religious purposes. Notable examples were Teresa of Ávila , John of the Cross , Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz , Garcilaso de la Vega , Francisco de Medrano and Lope de Vega . Although better known for his epic Os Lusíadas , Luís de Camões is also considered the greatest Portuguese lyric poet of the period. In Japan, the naga-uta ("long song") was a lyric poem popular in this era. It alternated five and seven-syllable lines and ended with an extra seven-syllable line. Lyrical poetry

3496-461: The neighboring pine woods." The three sisters were independent and outspoken, which did not always sit well with the authority figures in their lives. Millay's grade school principal, offended by her frank attitude, refused to call her Vincent. Instead, he called her by any woman's name that started with a V. At Camden High School, Millay began developing her literary talents, starting at the school's literary magazine, The Megunticook . At 14, she won

3572-424: The next in line, Yet mine the harvest, and the title mine — Those acres, fertile, and the furrows straight, From which the lark would rise — all of my late Enchantments, still, in brilliant colours, shine, Millay died at her home on October 19, 1950, at age 58. She had fallen down the stairs and was found with a broken neck approximately eight hours after her death. Her physician reported that she had suffered

3648-504: The night. Millay's 1920 collection A Few Figs From Thistles drew controversy for its exploration of female sexuality and feminism. She engaged in highly successful nationwide tours in which she offered public readings of her poetry. To support her days in the Village, Millay wrote short stories for Ainslee's Magazine . As an aesthete and a canny protector of her identity as a poet, she insisted on publishing this more mass-appeal work under

3724-574: The other hand, expected its students to be refined and live according to their status as young ladies. Millay often would not be formally reprimanded out of respect of her work. At the end of her senior year in 1917, the faculty voted to suspend Millay indefinitely; however, in response to a petition by her peers, she was allowed to graduate. She was a prominent campus writer, becoming a regular contributor to The Vassar Miscellany . She had relationships with many fellow students during her time there and kept scrapbooks including drafts of plays written during

3800-425: The period include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , Novalis , Friedrich Schiller , and Johann Heinrich Voß . Kobayashi Issa was a Japanese lyric poet during this period. In Diderot's Encyclopédie , Louis chevalier de Jaucourt described lyric poetry of the time as "a type of poetry totally devoted to sentiment; that's its substance, its essential object". In Europe, the lyric emerged as the principal poetic form of

3876-612: The period is Martin Opitz ; in Japan, this was the era of the noted haiku -writer Matsuo Bashō . In the 18th century, lyric poetry declined in England and France. The atmosphere of literary discussion in the English coffeehouses and French salons was not congenial to lyric poetry. Exceptions include the lyrics of Robert Burns , William Cowper , Thomas Gray , and Oliver Goldsmith . German lyric poets of

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3952-460: The period. While at school, she had several romantic relationships with women, including Edith Wynne Matthison , who would go on to become an actress in silent films. After she graduated from Vassar in 1917, Millay moved to New York City . She lived in Greenwich Village just as it was becoming known as a bohemian writers' haven. She resided in a number of places, including a house owned by

4028-500: The piano at the Whitehall Inn in Camden, Maine and was so impressed that she offered to pay for Millay's education at Vassar College . Millay entered Vassar College in 1913 at age 21. Her attendance at Vassar, which she called a "hell-hole", became a strain to her due to its strict nature. Before she attended college, Millay had a liberal home life that included smoking, drinking, playing gin rummy , and flirting with men. Vassar, on

4104-401: The pitch-darkness...and rolled for some distance down a rocky gully." The accident severely damaged nerves in her spine, requiring frequent surgeries and hospitalizations, and at least daily doses of morphine. Millay lived the rest of her life in "constant pain". Despite her accident, Millay was sufficiently alarmed by the rise of fascism to write against it. During World War I , she had been

4180-483: The poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The poet Richard Wilbur asserted that Millay "wrote some of the best sonnets of the century." Nancy Milford published a biography of the poet in 2001, Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St Vincent Millay. Millay's sister, Norma Millay (then her only living relative), offered Milford access to the poet's papers based on her successful biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda . Milford also edited and wrote an introduction for

4256-549: The pseudonym Nancy Boyd. In January 1921, Millay traveled to Paris , where she met and befriended the sculptors Thelma Wood and Constantin Brâncuși , photographer Man Ray , had affairs with journalists George Slocombe and John Carter, and became pregnant by a man named Daubigny. She secured a marriage license but instead returned to New England where her mother Cora helped induce an abortion with alkanet , as recommended in her old copy of Culpeper's Complete Herbal . Possibly as

4332-531: The purchase of the double-house at 198–200 Broadway, Rockland, Maine . Built in 1891, Henry T. and Cora B. Millay were the first tenants of the north side, where Cora gave birth to her first of three daughters during a February 1892 squall. Identified as the Singhi Double House, the home was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2019 not as the poet's birthplace, but as a "good example" of

4408-426: The rhythmic forms have persisted without the music. The most common meters are as follows: Some forms have a combination of meters, often using a different meter for the refrain . For the ancient Greeks , lyric poetry had a precise technical meaning: Verse that was accompanied by a lyre , cithara , or barbitos . Because such works were typically sung, it was also known as melic poetry. The lyric or melic poet

4484-489: The state of New York paid $ 1.69 million to acquire 230 acres (0.93 km) of Steepletop, to add the land to a nearby state forest preserve. The proceeds of the sale were used by the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society to restore the farmhouse and grounds and turn it into a museum. The museum opened to the public in the summer of 2010. Conservation of the house has been ongoing. Conservation of Millay's birthplace began in 2015 with

4560-589: The stature of great literary figures.'' By the 1930s, her critical reputation began to decline, as modernist critics dismissed her work for its use of traditional poetic forms and subject matter, in contrast to modernism's exhortation to "make it new." However, the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1960s and 1970s revived an interest in Millay's works. Millay was born Edna Vincent Millay in Rockland, Maine , on February 22, 1892. Her parents were Cora Lounella Buzelle,

4636-507: The thematic ancestor of much medieval, Renaissance, Romantic, and modern lyric poetry, but these works were composed in elegiac couplets and so were not lyric poetry in the ancient sense. During China 's Warring States period , the Songs of Chu collected by Qu Yuan and Song Yu defined a new form of poetry that came from the exotic Yangtze Valley , far from the Wei and Yellow River homeland of

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4712-467: The traditional four-character verses collected in the Book of Songs . The varying forms of the new Chu Ci provided more rhythm and greater latitude of expression. Originating in 10th century Persian , a ghazal is a poetic form consisting of couplets that share a rhyme and a refrain . Formally, it consists of a short lyric composed in a single meter with a single rhyme throughout. The subject

4788-422: The troubadour poets when the two met in 1912. The relevance and acceptability of the lyric in the modern age was, though, called into question by modernist poets such as Ezra Pound , T. S. Eliot , H.D. , and William Carlos Williams , who rejected the English lyric form of the 19th century, feeling that it relied too heavily on melodious language, rather than complexity of thought. After World War II,

4864-521: The war years, possibly due to a morphine addiction she acquired following her accident, she subsequently sought treatment for it and was successfully rehabilitated. Boissevain died in 1949 of lung cancer , leaving Millay to live alone for the last year of her life. Her final collection of poems was published posthumously as the volume "Mine the Harvest." The title sonnet recalls her career: Those hours when happy hours were my estate, — Entailed, as proper, for

4940-454: The winner after sorting through thousands of entries, reading only two lines apiece. Earle sent a letter informing Millay of her win before consulting with the other judges, who had previously and separately agreed on a criterion for a winner to winnow down the massive flood of entrants. According to the remaining judges, the winning poem had to exhibit social relevance, and "Renascence" did not. The entry of Orrick Glenday Johns , "Second Avenue,"

5016-530: The writers Witter Bynner , Arthur Davison Ficke , and Susan Glaspell . In 1919, she wrote the anti-war play Aria da Capo , which starred her sister Norma Millay at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York City. In 1921, Millay would write The Lamp and the Bell, her first verse drama , at the request of the drama department of Vassar. While establishing her career as a poet, Millay initially worked with

5092-477: Was Hook and Ladder Company Eagle No. 4 in the mid-19th century. Today the building, once two stories high, now five, is a Buddhist temple. The New York County Jail, better known as the Eldridge Street Jail, was located at 22 Eldridge Street and operated from 1836 to 1862, when it was replaced by a new jail on Ludlow Street . The jail building started out as a three-story private home and before becoming

5168-482: Was able to meet with the governor of Massachusetts, Alvan T. Fuller , to plead for a retrial. Her failure to prevent the executions would be a catalyst for her politicization in her later works, beginning with the poem "Justice Denied In Massachusetts" about the case. Millay was staying at the Sanibel Palms Hotel when, on May 2, 1936, a fire started after a kerosene heater on the second floor exploded. Everything

5244-510: Was about the "squalid scenes" Johns saw on Eldridge Street and lower Second Avenue on New York's Lower East Side . Millay ultimately placed fourth. The press drew attention to the fact that the Millays were a family of working-class women living in poverty. Because the three winners were men, some people felt that sexism and classism were a factor in Millay's poem coming in fourth place. Controversy in newspaper columns and editorial pages launched

5320-468: Was characterized by strophic composition and live musical performance. Some poets, like Pindar extended the metrical forms in odes to a triad, including strophe , antistrophe (metrically identical to the strophe) and epode (whose form does not match that of the strophe). Among the major surviving Roman poets of the classical period, only Catullus ( Carmina 11 , 17 , 30 , 34 , 51 , 61 ) and Horace ( Odes ) wrote lyric poetry, which

5396-467: Was destroyed, including the only copy of Millay's long verse poem, Conversation at Midnight , and a 1600s poetry collection written by the Roman poet Catullus of the first century BC. She would go on to rewrite Conversation at Midnight from memory and release it the following year. In the summer of 1936, Millay was riding in a station wagon when the door suddenly swung open, and Millay “was hurled out into

5472-509: Was distinguished from the writer of plays (although Athenian drama included choral odes, in lyric form), the writer of trochaic and iambic verses (which were recited), the writer of elegies (accompanied by the flute, rather than the lyre) and the writer of epic. The scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria created a canon of nine lyric poets deemed especially worthy of critical study. These archaic and classical musician-poets included Sappho , Alcaeus , Anacreon and Pindar . Archaic lyric

5548-650: Was instead read or recited. What remained were the forms, the lyric meters of the Greeks adapted to Latin. Catullus was influenced by both archaic and Hellenistic Greek verse and belonged to a group of Roman poets called the Neoteroi ("New Poets") who spurned epic poetry following the lead of Callimachus . Instead, they composed brief, highly polished poems in various thematic and metrical genres. The Roman love elegies of Tibullus , Propertius , and Ovid ( Amores , Heroides ), with their personal phrasing and feeling, may be

5624-427: Was the dominant form of 17th century English poetry from John Donne to Andrew Marvell . The poems of this period were short. Rarely narrative, they tended towards intense expression. Other notable poets of the era include Ben Jonson , Robert Herrick , George Herbert , Aphra Behn , Thomas Carew , John Suckling , Richard Lovelace , John Milton , Richard Crashaw , and Henry Vaughan . A German lyric poet of

5700-458: Was the first woman and second person to win the award. In 1943, Millay was the sixth person and the second woman to be awarded the Frost Medal for her lifetime contribution to American poetry. Millay was highly regarded during much of her lifetime, with the prominent literary critic Edmund Wilson calling her "one of the only poets writing in English in our time who have attained to anything like

5776-410: Was the widower of labor lawyer and war correspondent Inez Milholland , a political icon Millay had met during her time at Vassar. A self-proclaimed feminist, Boissevain supported Millay's career and took primary care of domestic responsibilities. Both Millay and Boissevain had other lovers throughout their 26-year marriage. For Millay, one such significant relationship was with the poet George Dillon ,

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