“No woman poet of her generation was as adored, or as widely read or quoted, as Edna St. Vincent Millay,” Holly Peppe writes in her introduction to the new Selected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Millay’s ascent to the status Peppe describes, well-documented by multiple biographers, could be a movie tagline from the Golden Age of Hollywood: “Young woman of modest means from rural Maine skyrockets to stardom.” Not long after garnering wide accolades for her poem “Renascence” when she was only twenty-one years old, Millay became a sought-after celebrity among Greenwich Village literati. With the publication of her books A Few Figs from Thistles and The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems in the early 1920’s, she achieved national renown and earned a Pulitzer Prize, still just the beginning of a career that would span ten poetry collections along with numerous lauded works in other genres.
Author: Caitlin Doyle
Caitlin Doyle’s poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlantic, Boston Review, The New Criterion, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Threepenny Review, and others. Her poetry has also been featured through the PBS NewsHour Poetry Series and the Poetry Foundation’s “Poem of the Day” series. Doyle has held Writer-In-Residence teaching positions at Penn State, St. Albans School, and Interlochen Arts Academy. Her awards and fellowships include residencies at the Yaddo Colony, the James Merrill House, and the MacDowell Colony, as well as the Frost Farm Poetry Prize and the Amy Award through Poets & Writers. She is currently an Elliston Fellow in Poetry at the University of Cincinnati, and she will serve as the Assistant Editor of The Cincinnati Review starting this fall. You can visit her online at http://caitlindoylepoetry.com