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Photographer: Allen C. Browne
Taken: November 2, 2011
Caption: Edna St. Vincent Millay
Additional Description: This 1934 portrait of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Charles Ellis hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.

“Literaily and temperamentally precocious, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay exemplified the spirit of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and the emancipation of American Women. She started writing as a child an became a rebellious student at Vassar College. In 1917 she move to Greenwich Village, the center of avant-garde and rebel culture. She won the Pulitzer Prize for The Harp-Weaver in 1923. Poetically, Millay was a romantic, inspired by the ecstatic visions of John Keats and William Wordsworth; he first notable poem ‘Renascence’ (1912) spoke of nature that ‘breathed my soul back into me.’ Her famous quatrain ‘First Fig’ (1920) celebrates abandonment:

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.
Millay's romanticism was at odds with literary modernism, and her reputation has declined. However, during the 1920s she exemplified the age that she did so much to define.” — National Portrait Gallery.
Submitted: May 5, 2015, by Allen C. Browne of Silver Spring, Maryland.
Database Locator Identification Number: p307240
File Size: 0.944 Megabytes

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