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

Afternoon on a Hill

I will be the gladdest thing

Under the sun!

I will touch a hundred flowers

And not pick one!

 

I will look at cliffs and clouds

With quiet eyes,

Watch the wind bow down the grass

And the grass rise.

 

And when lights begin to show

Up from the town

I will mark which must be mine, 

And then start down!

Published:

1917

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Modernism

Anthology Years:

2022

2024

Themes:

Joy & Praise

Nature

Literary Devices:

Anaphora

a figure of speech in which words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences

End Rhyme

when a poem has lines ending with words that sound the same

Hyperbole

exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally

Sensory Detail

words used to invoke the five senses (vision, hearing, taste, touch, smell)