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

I, being born a woman, and distressed

I, being born a woman, and distressed

By all the needs and notions of my kind,

Am urged by your propinquity to find

Your person fair, and feel a certain zest

To bear your body's weight upon my breast:

So subtly is the fume of life designed,

To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,

And leave me once again undone, possessed.

Think not for this, however, this poor treason

Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,

I shall remember you with love, or season

My scorn with pity — let me make it plain:

I find this frenzy insufficient reason

For conversation when we meet again.

Published:

1923

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Modernism

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Humor & Satire

Love & Relationships

Poetic Form

Womanhood

Literary Devices:

End Rhyme

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

Irony

the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect

Personification

the attribution of human qualities to a non-human thing

Sonnet

A poem with fourteen lines that traditionally uses a fixed rhyme scheme and meter.