The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver and Other Poems 12+

📓 Edna St. Vincent Millay, (born February 22, 1892, Rockland, Maine, U.S.—died October 19, 1950, Austerlitz, New York), American poet and dramatist who came to personify romantic rebellion and bravado in the 1920s.Millay was reared in Camden, Maine, by her divorced mother, who recognized and encouraged her talent in writing poetry. Her first published poem appeared in the St. Nicholas Magazine for children in October 1906. She remained at home after her graduation from high school in 1909, and in four years she published five more poems in St. Nicholas. Her first acclaim came when “Renascence” was included in The Lyric Year in 1912; the poem brought Millay to the attention of a benefactor who made it possible for her to attend Vassar College. She graduated in 1917.In that year Millay published her first book, Renascence and Other Poems, and moved to Greenwich Village in New York City. There she became a lively and admired figure among the avant garde and radical literary set. To support herself Millay, under the pseudonym “Nancy Boyd,” submitted hackwork verse and short stories to magazines, and while her ambition to go on the stage was short-lived, she worked with the Provincetown Players for a time and later wrote the one-act Aria da Capo (1920) for them. The same year she published the verse collection A Few Figs from Thistles, from which the line “My candle burns at both ends” derives. The poem was taken up as the watchword of the “flaming youth” of that era and brought her...