's Best of 2001
Poet, playwright, and translator Daniel Mark Epstein certainly has the right background to understand and evaluate poet, playwright, and translator Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)--though Millay didn't write biographies. Readers of Epstein's Sister Aimee and Nat King Cole will recognize the intense personal engagement the author brings to his task. He's not afraid to express an almost physical fascination for his subjects, which is especially appropriate for the flamboyant Millay, who insisted on the right to take as many lovers as she pleased and to write about them in some of the greatest erotic poetry in American verse. Epstein focuses on that poetry, deciphering the affairs that fueled it and elucidating the boldly iconoclastic, almost cynical acceptance of love's fleeting nature that informs it. (Of the last sonnet in A Few Figs from Thistles, with its notorious putdown, "I shall forget you presently, my dear / So make the most of this, your little day," he remarks: "For a woman, not yet thirty, to compose and market such a poem... was a scandal, an alarm, and a red flag to censors.") While the Edna St. Vincent Millay who emerges in Nancy Milford's Savage Beauty is indelibly shaped by her upbringing, particularly her relationship with her mother and sisters, Epstein's Millay is a self-created goddess of love and literature. It's fascinating to compare these two biographies, published nearly simultaneously and each with considerable merits. Milford's lengthy book, the product of three decades of research, is lavish with details and comprehensive in scope. Epstein's more selective work excels in cogent summaries and forcefully stated opinions. Either book will satisfy readers with an interest in Millay or American literature; really passionate aficionados of the art of biography will want to read both. --Wendy Smith


From Publishers Weekly
Sexually implacable, perennially noncommittal and, by all accounts, possessed of an irresistible charisma, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay led a love life of Byronic proportions. The truth about her personal affairs was scarcely less fantastic than the rampant speculations; even now, historians find it difficult to separate Millay rumor from Millay fact. This volume, a case in point, is less a biography of the great seductress than an imaginative reconstruction of her amorous adventures. As such, it reads like a literary novel with a racy streak. Some may argue that Epstein goes too far in the fictional coloring of his heroine, particularly in the early parts of the book, where he refers to one of America's greatest lyric poets as "the little sorceress" and "the little actress." Still, Epstein's telling of the poet's progress makes for gripping narrative and will satisfy readers interested in Millay's romantic image and sources of inspiration. An experienced author and poet himself, Epstein is especially skillful at calling up vivid images, and he makes even the better-known facets of Millay's love life (such as her bisexuality and her 25-year open marriage) seem fresh. The book's preface makes much of Epstein's use of unpublished material viewed by hardly anyone besides the poet's sister Norma and "possibly one other biographer whom [Norma] engaged to write a book in the 1970s." In a case of fateful timing, the "other biographer" (Nancy Milford) will at last publish her book, Savage Beauty (Forecasts, June 18), in the same month as Epstein's, and will almost certainly steal his thunder. Whereas Epstein's book offers a rousing tribute to the Millay legend, Milford's outstrips his in breadth and subtlety. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Epstein, a poet as well as a biographer of such disparate figures as Nat King Cole and the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, takes a tightly focused approach by, as he explains, "discussing Millay's love life and how the poetry arose from it." He writes with acuity and grace about the young Millay's determination, yearnings, and intellectual spirituality. By homing in on her erotic life, Epstein runs the risk of belittling Millay's extraordinary literary gifts, "vatic" poetic persona, moral passion, and vibrant and courageous life of the mind. Yet his insights into her adrogony, his understanding of just how ahead of her time she was, his placing her in the pantheon with Shelley, Coleridge, and Baudelaire, and his respect for her marriage to the supportive Eugen Boissevain keep him on solid ground. Certain disclosures, paricularly of Millay's secret racehorse investments, await further study, but Epsteins' keen reading of Millay's poetry and temperament is smart, stirring, and invauluable. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM OUR EDITORS

Burning her candle on both ends, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) spent much of her short life as a poet-priestess of love. This tiny, seductive woman expressed herself in her torrid and often tumultuous affairs and in her searing lyric verse. Award-winning poet Daniel Mark Epstein has constructed a moving collage of love poems, diaries, letters, and journals that illuminate Millay's romantic fervor.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This is the story of a rare sort of American genius, a young girl from Camden, Maine, who used her pen as a key to open doors to the wider world. Raised in a female, theatrics-loving household, the sensitive child harbored a talent for words, music, and drama and an inexorable desire to be loved. When Edna St. Vincent Millay was twenty, her poetry would make her famous; at thirty she would be loved by readers the world over.

She was widely considered to be the most seductive woman of her age. Few men could resist her, and many women also fell under her spell. From the publication of her first poems until the scandal over Fatal Interview twenty years later, gossip about the poet's liberated lifestyle prompted speculation about who might be the real subject of her verses.

With a poet's insight, Daniel Mark Epstein re-creates the dramatic events and ideas that led to Millay's precocious masterpiece "Renascence," published when she was just nineteen. His detective work exposes the affair between the young poet and the middle-aged editor Arthur Hooley, who encouraged her sexual adventures at Vassar. Epstein has also discovered love letters from the poet George Dillon illuminating the romance that threatened Millay's marriage, and a cache of correspondence concerning the poet's surprising obsession and success with Thoroughbred horse racing.

Using sources that have been seen by a mere handful of people since the poet's death, Daniel Mark Epstein tells the astonishing story of the life, dedicated to art and love, that inspired the sublime lyrics of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

SYNOPSIS

Based on access to unpublished diaries, journals, and correspondence from and to Millay (1892-1950), biographer-poet Epstein explores the wellspring of her muse (early trauma or spiritual odyssey?), lovers who inspired her sonnets, and the retreat into seclusion of one of America's foremost love poets. Part I traces the years culminating in "Renascence"; Part II follows her "whirlpool of eros" years; and Part III spans her marriage, addictions, and last poems.

Annotation © Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Sexually implacable, perennially noncommittal and, by all accounts, possessed of an irresistible charisma, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay led a love life of Byronic proportions. The truth about her personal affairs was scarcely less fantastic than the rampant speculations; even now, historians find it difficult to separate Millay rumor from Millay fact. This volume, a case in point, is less a biography of the great seductress than an imaginative reconstruction of her amorous adventures. As such, it reads like a literary novel with a racy streak. Some may argue that Epstein goes too far in the fictional coloring of his heroine, particularly in the early parts of the book, where he refers to one of America's greatest lyric poets as "the little sorceress" and "the little actress." Still, Epstein's telling of the poet's progress makes for gripping narrative and will satisfy readers interested in Millay's romantic image and sources of inspiration. An experienced author and poet himself, Epstein is especially skillful at calling up vivid images, and he makes even the better-known facets of Millay's love life (such as her bisexuality and her 25-year open marriage) seem fresh. The book's preface makes much of Epstein's use of unpublished material viewed by hardly anyone besides the poet's sister Norma and "possibly one other biographer whom [Norma] engaged to write a book in the 1970s." In a case of fateful timing, the "other biographer" (Nancy Milford) will at last publish her book, Savage Beauty (Forecasts, June 18), in the same month as Epstein's, and will almost certainly steal his thunder. Whereas Epstein's book offers a rousing tribute to the Millay legend, Milford's outstrips his inbreadth and subtlety. (Sept. 10) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

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