Coleman,+Charlene

Edna St. Vincent Millay


"Millay was one of the most skillful writers of sonnets in the twentieth century, and also like Frost, she was able to combine modernist attitudes with traditional forms creating a unique American poetry."

"Although sympathetic with socialist hopes "of a free and equal society," as she told Grace Hamilton King in an interview included in //The Development of the Social Consciousness of Edna St. Vincent Millay as Manifested in Her Poetry,// Millay never became a Communist. However, her works reflect the spirit of nonconformity that imbued her Greenwich Village milieu."

"Fearful of being possessed and dominated, the poet disparaged human passion and dedicated her soul to poetry. Millay thus maintained a dichotomy between soul and body that is evident in many of her works." "Rarely since [ancient Greek lyric poet] Sappho," wrote Carl Van Doren in //Many Minds,// had a woman "written as outspokenly as Millay."

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Apostrophe To Man
Detestable race, continue to expunge yourself, die out. Breed faster, crowd, encroach, sing hymns, build bombing airplanes; Make speeches, unveil statues, issue bonds, parade; Convert again into explosives the bewildered ammonia and the distracted cellulose; Convert again into putrescent matter drawing flies The hopeful bodies of the young; exhort, Pray, pull long faces, be earnest, be all but overcome, be photographed; Confer, perfect your formulae, commercialize Bacateria harmful to human tissue, Put death on the market; Breed, crowd, encroach, expand, expunge yourself, die out, Homo called sapiens.

//Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink//
media type="youtube" key="mvgDAOG8W6c" width="425" height="350" align="right" Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, Or nagged by want past resolution's power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food. It well may be. I do not think I would.