they really want you, they really do

[lotesse]

So I guess it's Edmund Wilson's birthday toady? 'Oo those awful orcs' Edmund Wilson.

I have to say that one of the great unexpected pleasures I've found in reading up on Edna St. Vincent Millay's biography is the grace, persistence, and brutality with which she dismissed him and his overinterested dick over the years.

Comments

[ithiliana]

OOOOOOO, really?

Goes to look for Millay's biography (or autobiography?)???

Because WOW.

[ithiliana]

Nancy Milford's?

I've always loved her poetry, so this is worth checking out.

[lotesse]

I've read the Milford bio three times! it's really good, I think for more reasons than my intense fixation with Millay, but then again I'm so stupid in love with her that it can be hard for me to tell.

[ithiliana]

I couldn't find any other bio, and it was only $12 on Kindle, so I bought it, and stayed up way too late last night devouring it (I'm partway through Part II, while she's at Vassar), and WOW.

Just, WOW.

I suffered intense passion for Millay's poetry back in the day when her work was only sort of grudgingly allowed in the lit classes--I see now it is time to renew that passion!

And I can be pretty picky about biographies--but I think Milford's is fantastic--the extensive quotes, the interviews, the....hmmm.....narrative or biographical voice? A very empathic biography.

I can tell I'll be rereading it as soon as I finish and also zooming around to get some of Millay's poetry....

[ithiliana]

Also LOVING Millay's voice in her journal/diary writing (not to mention all the amazing women around her)......

[lotesse]

So I read Millay for the first time when I was maybe 16, I'd never heard of her before, didn't know anyone else who had. And of course being me, my first response when I find a good textual thing is to drag it home like a cat with a mouse to share with my people. I knew my grandmother would just love this stuff, I knew it. And I said to her, grandmother I've found this wonderful poet, and she said oh Edna St. Vincent Millay, I remember the day she died we all wore black velvet armbands to school in mourning and my little girlfriends and I cried buckets for weeks. Utterly scooped. But she seems to have fallen out of the picture for my generation, sadly!

[lotesse]

also ime she's still only grudgingly allowed in classes; I've managed to write on her, but only through great persistence and some theoretical contortion

[ithiliana]

Grrrrr...I mean I was talking about back in the 70s. How frustratingly/irritatingly, grrrr

[ithiliana]

That is fantastic, hearing from your grandmother.

Other favorite feminist poets include Adrienne Rich and Denise Levertov, but they're from a later generation than Millay. (I never could get that into Sylvia Plath).

[lotesse]

AR is my homegirl, but I haven't encountered Levertov - thanks for the rec! I love SOME Plath intensely, but don't adore her in the complete way AR & ESVM get me.

have you read Natasha Trethewy? she's the poet laureate now, which is way cool, & she does GORGEOUS work.