Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay [Paperback]

Nancy Milford (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 10, 2002

Thomas Hardy once said that America had two great attractions: the skyscraper and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The most famous poet of the Jazz Age, Millay captivated the nation: She smoked in public, took many lovers (men and women, single and married), flouted convention sensationally, and became the embodiment of the New Woman.

Thirty years after her landmark biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, Nancy Milford returns with an iconic portrait of this passionate, fearless woman who obsessed America even as she tormented herself. Chosen by USA Today as one of the top ten books of the year, Savage Beauty is a triumph in the art of biography. Millay was an American original—one of those rare characters, like Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway, whose lives were even more dramatic than their art.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Fans of Zelda, Nancy Milford's groundbreaking (and bestselling) biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald's tortured wife and muse, have been waiting impatiently since 1970 for Milford's promised follow-up about poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950). It's finally here, and they will not be disappointed. Milford's vivid narrative limns an electric personality with psychological acuity while capturing the freewheeling atmosphere of America in the turbulent years following World War I. After "Renascence" was published (when she was only 20) and she moved to Greenwich Village, Millay was the queen of bohemia, taking lovers with zest and voicing the reckless gaiety of a generation in her famous lyric, "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." With her flame-red hair, milk-white skin, and a voice that thrilled audiences (making her poetry readings a welcome source of income), Millay was the archetypal "new woman": powerful, passionate, and not to be ignored. But Milford makes it clear that her first loyalty was to her mother and sisters, and her deepest commitment to her writing. This juicy chronicle has famous names aplenty--critic Edmund Wilson and Masses editor Floyd Dell were among the men devastated by her refusal to be faithful--and lots of dissipation: Millay drank heavily and became addicted to morphine. It also takes a perceptive look at how an artist draws material from her life and at the strategies she uses to protect the wellsprings of creativity. Brief passages interspersed throughout delineating Milford's interactions with Norma Millay, the poet's younger sister and literary executor, might have been self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing; instead they offer intriguing snapshots of the complex process by which biography is made. The resulting book is a tour de force, and wildly entertaining as well. --Wendy Smith --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Milford hit the New York Times bestseller list 30 years ago with her acclaimed biography of Zelda Fitzgerald; she now seems poised to do it again with this outstanding biography of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Like Fitzgerald, Millay (1892-1950) was a Jazz Age phenomenon, causing a sensation wherever she went; lines from her brief poem, "First Fig" ("I burn my candle at both ends/ It will not last the night... ") would become the rallying cry of a generation. She was notorious for her sexual unconventionality and (as Edmund Wilson put it) "her intoxicating effect on people... of all ages and both sexes." How a lyric poet could have achieved such celebrity is the conundrum at the heart of Savage Beauty. Millay, as Milford depicts her, was a troubled genius who used her prodigious gift to propel herself out of rural poverty and into the center of her age. She carefully cultivated the reporters and patrons who took the "fragile girl-child" under their wing. But her delicate image masked a force of nature whose incendiary wit and insatiable ambition took the public by storm. Milford deftly links the lyric intensity of Millay's work with her ravenous appetite for life. Whether tracing her ghoulishly close relationship to her mother and sisters, her years at the center of cosmopolitan life or her morphine addiction and untimely death, this account offers its readers a haunting drama of artistic fame. A true paradigm of literary biography, this finely crafted book is not to be missed. (Sept. 11) Forecast: Zelda, a finalist for the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, sold 1.4 million copies. In addition to a nine-city author tour and first serial publication in Vanity Fair, Mitford will be interviewed in the September issue of Harper's Bazaar. Expect lots of excellent reviews and return trips to the printer once the 75,000 initial run sells out. Along with this bio, Modern Library will issue a new edition of Millay's poetry, edited by
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 608 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (September 10, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375760814
• ISBN-13: 978-0375760815
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.2 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (58 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #55,262 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #1 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( M ) > Millay, Edna St. Vincent
  • #24 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Women's Studies > Women Writers

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 42 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars access to letters provides accurate picture July 25, 2002

By Karen Sampson Hudson

Format:Hardcover

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!

110 of 128 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Great Sources, Poor Development January 6, 2002

By Amateur Revier 2

Format:Hardcover

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.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating and informative December 19, 2002

By Todd V. LEONE

Format:Hardcover

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.