68 of 69 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What a GREAT READ!!!, September 1, 2001
By A Customer
This compellingly readable, lushly evocative biography focuses on the lovers and the love affairs that inspired Millay's best-known poetry. While Millay capitalized on her public image as a jazz-age "free spirit"--reckless, heedless and enjoying every minute-- her life story reads like a great, tragic Romantic novel.
Millay's hardscrabble childhood in turn-of-the(20th)-century Maine is so vividly conjured in Epstein's story, you can just about smell the smoke from the cast iron stove as she careens between the crushing responsibility of caring for her younger sisters and the imaginative escape she forged through music, theater and poetry. Through a combination of sly manipulation, talent and sheer luck, Millay went from being an arty local eccentric to a national celebrity--the cynosure of the Manhattan literary scene--at the age of 20, virtually overnight. The seemingly incongruous combination of her porcelain-doll looks and unabashedly passionate (yet formally rigorous) poetry acted like catnip for her contemporaries, men and women alike: she looked like an angel, behaved like a libertine, and packed an intellectual wallop equal to that of any man. Epstein describes the compulsive pace at which, during the height of her poetic production, Millay conducted many, often simultaneous, love affairs, lavishing indifference on the legions who worshipped her image and reputation, and suffering agonizing unrequited passion for the (relatively few) others.
By focusing on the most significant affairs and linking them (with impressive use of both painstaking scholarship and critical insight)to specific poems, Epstein incisively portrays the emotional pitch of the time without getting bogged down in endless lists of names, dates and locations. By crafting the narrative in this way, Epstein selects and contextualizes Millay's own words and documented actions to show--not tell-- how both physical illness and a likely manic-depressive disorder spiralled under the pressure to live up to her own legend. This is masterful storytelling, through and through.
Much as she was rescued, "deus ex machina" from an small-time life in Maine by a dowager patroness, Millay was rescued again in 1923, this time from life-threatening illness and despondency by a real-life Romantic hero (a Belgian Mr. Darcy?), whom she had the good sense to marry. While he set aside his own business to support her work and to shelter her from the strain of public and critical scrutiny, their idyllic rural marriage scenario stultified her creativity. Millay's dogged pursuit (with her husband's active consent) of an affair with a reluctant younger man is affectingly portrayed as a desperate, unconsciously delusional act of self-abasement in the service of her own (fading) sexual persona and the poetry which that persona had always sponsored so reliably. And it worked: great sonnets happened, albeit at no small cost. The waning of this affair, plus a series of illnesses and accidents, provided a host of pretexts for Millay's descent into astoundingly heavy-duty drug addiction and alcoholism. Epstein conveys the wrenching pathos of her repeated struggles to overcome these addictions, with--and, later, without-- her husband's devoted help. Set into this context, excerpts from her journals and letters illuminate a more richly layered, genuine and fragile Millay than other biographies even begin to approach.
Epstein--a highly accomplished poet himself--thankfully resists the temptation to psychoanalyze, sensationalize or turn Millay's life story into a morality tale. Instead, this beautifully-written, insightful and engaging feat of storytelling captures the essence of a real-life Romantic spirit who made poetry the only way she knew how--by living it.
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26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A woman poet's life, uncensored . . ., August 29, 2001
By A Customer
This is a marvelous account of the difficult early life, passionate love affairs, and heartbreaking physical demise of the gifted poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose journey from poverty to celebrity to alcohol and drug addiction follows a familiar and distinctively modern course.
From this scrupulously researched life story, complete with previously unpublished journal entries and letters, Epstein takes us first inside the mind and heart of a girl who longed for love, then into the life of a woman who could never satisfy her ravenous appetite for passion. In the course of his often spellbinding narrative, he presents critical life events other Millay biographers have missed, such as the teenage poet's first erotic experience, with a female friend, and her surprising obsession for horse breeding and racing that eventually drained the considerable fortune she'd earned as one of America's best-known poets.
An accomplished poet himself, Epstein also recognizes Millay's genius as a lyricist whose sonnets are considered some of the finest in the language. He illuminates the meaning of some of her most famous poems and the life events that inspired them: the spiritual crisis that resulted in "Renascence," for example, and the tumultuous love affair with a lonely young poet that threatened her marriage and inspired the 52-sonnet sequence, "Fatal Interview."
This is a captivating tale, alternately joyous and sad, passionate and desperate, suspenseful and ultimately moving-a must-read for those interested in how life sometimes fools us into thinking that talent, fame, and fortune are synonymous with happiness and peace of mind.
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Comprehensive Survey of This Poet's Life, October 25, 2001
This biography was a fast and furious read, due to the great anecdotes as well as the tightly-written analysis. Ms. Millay's life was a whirlwind and many heretofore unknown facts and episodes are revealed, adding richness to the typical chronological description of this writer's life. Ms. Millay was more than a writer, she was a full-blown creative personality, in a time when to do so as a woman from a modest background was virtually unheard of. Even for those who do not know her poems or do not usually read literary biography, this book documents a fascinating woman's life and is well worth picking up.
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