Edna St. Vincent Millay

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Throughout much of her career, Pulitzer Prize-winner Edna St. Vincent Millay was one of the most successful and respected poets in America. She is noted for both her dramatic works, including Aria da capo, The Lamp and the Bell, and the libretto composed for an opera, The King’s Henchman, and for such lyric verses as “Renascence” and the poems found in the collections A Few Figs From Thistles, Second April, and The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver,winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Like her contemporary Robert Frost, Millay was one of the most skillful writers of sonnets in the twentieth century, and also like Frost, she was able to combine modernist attitudes with traditional forms creating a unique American poetry. But Millay’s popularity as a poet had at least as much to do with her person: she was known for her riveting readings and performances, her progressive political stances, frank portrayal of both hetero and homosexuality, and, above all, her embodiment and description of new kinds of female experience and expression.  Source

To a Young Poet

Time cannot break the bird's wing from the bird.

Bird and wing together

Go down, one feather.

 

No thing that ever flew,

Not the lark, not you,

Can die as others do.

Published:

1931

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Modernism

Anthology Years:

2022

Themes:

Ars Poetica

Nature

Literary Devices:

Extended Metaphor

a metaphor that extends through several lines or even an entire poem

Metonymy

replacing the name of a thing with the name of something closely associated

Tercet

A stanza of three lines of verse that rhyme together or are connected by rhyme with an adjacent stanza.