Edna St Vincent Millay

Praised by poets and critics ranging from A. E. Housman and Thomas Hardy to Edmund Wilson, Edna St. Vincent Millay's bold, exquisite poems take their place among the enduring verse of the twentieth century. Claiming a lyric tradition stretching back to Sappho and Catullus and making it very much her own, Millay won over her contemporaries--and readers ever since--with her passion, erotic candor, formal elegance, and often mischievous wit. J. D. McClatchy's introduction and selections offer new and surprising insights into Millay's achievement. Included are her most beloved and justly admired poems, such as the wry bohemian anthem Recuerdo and the sonnet sequence Fatal Interview, the poetic record of a love affair that is presented in its entirety. McClatchy has also chosen works that extend our sense of Millay's range: translations, her play Aria da Capo, and excerpts from her libretto The King's Henchman. I have for the most part been guided by my taste for Millay at her tautest and truest, writes McClatchy. There are precise and resonant images everywhere. About the American Poets ProjectElegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today's most discerning poets and critics.

Millay's first three books of lyrics and sonnets are collected here: Renascence, Second April, and A Few Figs from Thistles. With a balanced and appreciative introduction and useful annotations, this volume presents some of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's best work in which she weaves intellect, emotion, and irony. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

This centenary edition celebrates Edna St Vincent Millay (1892-1950), one of the most popular poets of her generation and the best-known American poet of her time. Some of her achievements are, as her editor Colin Falck says, ‘unlike anything that exists elsewhere in English-language poetry’. She is a brilliantly innovative verse technician, finding latent energies in traditional forms and discovering new means of her own to express what Falck calls ‘her complex and extremely subtle feminist consciousness, her almost Blakean sense of the mysteriousness of ordinary life.’ ‘I know that Millay is a good poet,’ writes Richard Wilbur, ‘because there are so many of her lines in my memory.’ ‘She wrote some of the best sonnets of the century,’ Richard Eberhart says. Millay’s work is resistant to theory and cannot easily be adapted to modernism. Yet she has never forfeited the love of general readers and a new generation will find here the work of one of the most passionate and accomplished poets of the century.

More than 180 sonnets selected from Millay's books of poems--including 20 sonnets from Mine the Harvest not contained in previous editions of her Collected Sonnets--are brought together in this expanded edition. An introduction by Norma Millay, written expressly for this volume, focuses on examples of the poet's variations in sonnet structure. Here is the voice of Millay, whose prophetic vision, devotion to freedom, and intellectual daring combine with her mastery of the sonnet form to speak eloquently for the human spirit.