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35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
access to letters provides accurate picture, July 25, 2002
This book, one of two biographies of Edna St. Vincent Millay out this year, provides us with a full-fleshed view of the lyric poet. Nancy Milford had unparalleled access to the correspondence of Millay, and interviews with her surviving sister, Norma. Milford wrote the book over a period of years, allowing her study of Millay some time for seasoning and reflection. The early slangy, insouciant letters between the poet and her mother and sisters, are a delight, revealing their loving, teasing relationships. (I admit to being surprised by their wide use of baby talk.) Since Millay moved in literary circles and knew many writers, the letters back and forth to lovers and friends are wonderfully expressive. Many female readers may wish that their husbands and boyfriends could write of love and longing as eloquently!
Milford reveals how Millay labored over her art, how creating her lyrics which seem to flow smoothly and effortlessly, required energy and commitment on her part to produce.
She details Millay's slide into alcoholism and drug dependence in her later years. One wonders how intelligent, educated people like Millay and her husband Eugene could fall into such a state, but apparently there was no one in their lives to do what today is trendily called "an intervention," and as they became more and more isolated, Millay's physical decline was accelerated.
Kudoes to Nancy Milford for a comprehensive biography of a passionate American poet!
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101 of 118 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Great Sources, Poor Development, January 6, 2002
It seems cruelly ironic that after 30 years of working on a biography of an obscure (to most Americans living today) poetess, Nancy Milford would have to compete with another biographer's book on the same subject, published within the same month. It is even more cruel that despite the fact that Daniel Epstein's biography of Mrs. Millay, "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed" was only 3 years in the making, it is much more of a definitive biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay than Milford's highly emotional and occasionally subjective portrait could ever hope to become. Bill Moyers wrote that in Milford's tome, "Millay lives! And she casts a spell over the reader as mesmerizing as her poetry..." This is true. The problem is that the only reason Millay casts a spell over the reader, is because this overly-long book is practically an edited version of her journals. I have no problem with lengthy biographies, but, quite surprisingly considering the amount of time she spent immersed in Millay's archives, Milford does not seem to have enough of a grasp of the story, to understand that a lot of details that she leaves in are absolutely unnecessary. She also does not understand that a lot of the occasionally frustratingly long excerpts quoted from Millay's journals, letters and notes could have easily been paraphrased and summarized, and that actual analysis would have been more welcome in its place. At times, I felt like I was wading through these documents myself, and had to decide which of them were important and which were not. As far as I know that is for the author to do.
Furthermore, unlike Epstein, who expertly discusses Millay's place in the pantheon of America's greatest poets and debates the reasons for her subsequent banishment from the literary scene, Millay's biography never really moves out of the realm of the poetess' inner journey, rendering a highly charged and inherently incomplete portrait. Characters come in and out without explanation, Milford never explains Millay's amorous adventures with other women as being lesbian relationships and the reader is left to guess whether Milford's lack of explanation suggests that she believed these affairs were without consequence and unrevelatory about the poet's real sexuality. Were these affairs common at the time? Was her lesbianism or bisexuality an open secret to Millay's coterie? Is Eugen's constant use of the word "love" to describe his feelings for Millay's lovers possibly suggestive of a menage-a-trois? Time and again the reader is left with more questions than answers, and Milford herself constantly poses questions for the reader, in a let-the-reader decide stance that does not suggest much skill on the part of the biographer.
Personally, I felt lost half of the time as I devoured the highly readable book. Despite its shortcomings, and its inferiority in relation to Epstein's shorter yet more complete portrait of Edna Millay, Savage Beauty is a beautiful story of family, romance, literary genius and ultimately, descent into addiction and death. Nancy Milford's prose is as readable as Millay's poetry; it is her flawed build-up of the story, and lack of context for the reader, that makes it less than perfect.
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating and informative, December 19, 2002
Edna St. Vincent Millay, long my favorite poet, lived a fascinating, wild and even shocking life. Learning the truth about her may disturb some people, but I was happy to learn the details, sordid and exemplary. Nancy Milford writes engagingly and her biography of "Vincent" became for this reader quite a page-turner. The author's use of correspondence to and from Millay, and about Millay, reveals the character of this jazz-age poet with a sense of immediacy and freshness. (In that sense, this biography has a great deal in common with David McCullough's current best-selling and very engaging biography of John Adams.) Millay drank, was dependent on prescription pain killers, was promiscuous, and otherwise flouted the conventional morals of her time. She also wrote exquisite poetry and expressed not only beauty of spirit and self, but from time to time high-mindedness -- for example, in trying to evoke the national conscious during America's isolationist response to the rise of fascism in Europe. This biography is worth reading, as is Millay's poetry.
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