A little "renascence" to close out National Poetry Month [View all]

[ismnotwasm]

A little "renascence" to close out National Poetry Month

Curator Eric Jentsch shares artifacts related to American Pulitzer Prize Winner (1923) and Frost Medal Recipient, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950).





An 18-cent commemorative stamp honoring Millay was issued in 1981, in Austerlitz, New York, where Millay's farmstead, Steepletop, is located. The stamp is in the collection of the National Postal Museum. © U.S. Postal Service. All rights reserved.

Born in Rockland, Maine, Millay preferred to be called Vincent instead of Edna from an early age. As a young woman she established herself in New York's Greenwich Village, where she became one of the premier feminist icons of the jazz age and one of the most the most recognized American writers of the first half of the 20th century.

She was author of not only books of poetry, but also of plays, short stories, articles and librettos. Her poetry, marked with tender, sensitive language and creative imagery, extolled feminism, beauty, and social concern, while decrying fascism, injustice, and brutality.


In 1912, at the age of 19, Millay wrote her first major work "Renascence," and entered it into a competition held by a literary anthology. Although the poem came in fourth, many, including the contest's first and second place finishers, believed Millay's poem was easily superior. The ensuing notoriety compelled a patron of the arts to pay Millay's tuition at Vassar College, where the author enrolled in 1913 at the age of 21.

The poem, a description of spiritual rebirth or "renascence," concludes with this remarkable and insightful passage:

"The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat—the sky
Will cave in on him by and by."

http://blog.americanhistory.si.edu/osaycanyousee/2013/04/a-little-renascence-to-close-out-national-poetry-month.html

(And of course this, my favorite and the favorite of many)

"My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!"