Poems and Satires

by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Tristram Fane Saunders (Editor)

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) was one of the most popular American writers of her generation, and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Thomas Hardy once remarked that America had only two great wonders to show the skyscrapers, and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Poems and Satires restores that wonder to view, while also revealing Millay as a more innovative and versatile talent than she is usually given credit for being. It includes some of her wickedly funny satires (published under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd, out of print since 1924), as well as her acclaimed play Aria da Capo , and reveals her to be not only the defining 'flapper' poet of the 1920s but a crucial voice for the 2020s. The 'fierce and trivial' persona she cultivated in her early lyric poems and sonnets—with their dazzling wit and daring attitudes towards love and sexuality—captured the whirl of bohemian life in New York. In her genre-defying satires, she questioned society's treatment of women and artists in surreal stories and plays, non-fiction and spoof agony aunt letters, and even a Handmaid's Tale-esque dystopia disguised as an almanac from the future.

Genres: Poetry

200 pages, Paperback

Published November 25, 2021

About the author

Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American lyrical poet and playwright. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the third woman to win the award for poetry, and was also known for her feminist activism and her many love affairs. She used the pseudonym Nancy Boyd for her prose work.

This famous portrait of Vincent (as she was called by friends) was taken by Carl Van Vechten in 1933.

Reviews

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The shadows of the leaves were still. 'Whither have they flown, / then?' / I said, and waited for their wings, but they did not come back. If I / had known then / what I know now, I never would have left your door" (The Pigeons, 99)

Edna ("the herald of the New Woman") was a Pulitzer Prize-winning bi feminist flapper poet contemplating God and perfecting the sonnet, and I think that's beautiful. She spoke six languages, and her husband bought an island for her off the coast of Maine. An icon through and through.

I had never read Edna's satires before, so that was a delight. She was so witty! I especially loved "The Implacable Aphrodite" and the fact that she starts "Aria de Capo" with "A macaroon! I cannot live without a macaroon!" (125). Impeccable.

"I would give, to recall the sweetness and the frost of the lost blue plums, / Anything, anything. / I thrust my arm among the gray ambiguous nettles, and wait. / But they do not sting" (The Plum Gatherer, 103).

Bought this lovely edition in Birnam and read it deep in the Perthshire forest near The Hermitage. <3

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 really. Edna has written some absolute gems - the sonnets are utterly fantastic. Like a confessional lyrics poet that preceded Plath and Sexton - tamer, but just as fiery. Some missed the mark a bit, but I do really appreciate how inspiring she was, and she deserves more critical recognition today.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“To what purpose, Spring, do you return again? / Beauty is not enough. / You can no longer quiet me with the redness / Of little leaves opening stickily. / I know what I know.” There are so few twentieth-century poets I find as fun, profound and still accessible as Edna St Vincent Millay — Poems and Satires, a recent selection of Millay’s work edited by Tristram Fane Saunders is such a marvellous testament to that fact. Saunders says it best in his pitch-perfect introduction: her “best work is sharp and self-aware, tightly controlled even when dramatising a loss of control, deeply engaged with poetic tradition yet bitingly contemporary.” The book opens on Millay’s gorgeous sonnets, in particular my very favourite Millay poem, ‘If I should learn, in some quite casual way’. There’s the mini-sequence, ‘Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree’ (“And the blue night stood flattened against the window, staring through.”), and individual sonnets which declare that “Love is not all”, which see a world “When Man is gone and only gods remain”; even though they are littered with the dead, they feel less mournful than vibrant: “Take up the song; forget the epitaph.” And of course, among the best lines ever in a sonnet: “I will put Chaos into fourteen lines / And keep him there”. The lyric poems follow: ‘Renascence’, ‘Daphne’, ‘The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver’, ‘The Concert’, ‘Dirge Without Music’, ‘Modern Declaration’. Finally the satires close the book, from the play ‘Aria Da Capo’ to selections from Distressing Dialogues, published under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd, written as dialogues, letters, diaries. The perfect encapsulation of one of America’s best poets.

[cami .✶ฺﾟ｡ · Rating 5 out of 5]

she’s mastered the sonnet. awesome woman. one of my poetic greats.