Song of a Reformed Headhunter

A Poem to a Poet I am a poet, I have had my day For I have written one immortal line; Nor Greek nor Latin ever wrote more fine— The Poem: Edna St. Vincent Millay.             Cora Millay, “A Poet to A Poem,” quoted in Nancy Milford’s biography of Vincent You had pleasure at my making, happiness rolling in foam that on the scalloped shore raises to a gull shout and creaking oar an astonishing figure in an astonishing dress. Hardship you had also, the heavy progress from island to wild island, store to store, to have shut in your face the frightened door, before one dared receive you, your largesse. Mother! The name is too small for a lover, like Hestia who yielded her throne and fled. For dandelions, mustard, pig-weed, clover, abandoning the flowers of marriage bed, you search, jealous as Hera, the world all over. I am the best thought springing from your head.

Savage Beaut y does not dispel the impression that Edna St. Vincent Millay was a major life but a minor poet. This well-written biography quotes many poems in full, including "Renascence," which early won Millay warm admiration from poets and editors, and financial support for an education at Vassar. The biography occasionally grades the poems it quotes, saying of one "extraordinarily lovely" and of another "masterful." It is, however, more interested in identifying the addressee of the poems, and other details from Millay's life. A discussion of the style of "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver" begins insightfully but ends too quickly by linking the harp with a woman's head to the lap loom on which Clara Millay, Vincent's mother, wove hair for a living. Interesting identification, but it is surely not the last word on the poem. Matters are not helped when emphasis is placed on the astonishing attraction of Millay's low reading voice...