A charmingly fresh and sensitive story of America's foremost woman poet, whose poems are as well loved by young people today as they were in Edna St. Vincent Millay's lifetime.

Red-headed, green-eyed Vincent (as she called herself) grew up on the Maine seacoast in an old house that lacked physical comforts, but inside there was the warmth of family love and irrepressible gaiety. Because her mother was often away on nursing cases, Vincent was head of a happy-go-lucky household, looking after her two younger sisters when she wasn't daydreaming herself. An unusually gifted child, she longed to be a concert pianist or a dramatic actress or maybe a poet, though she took her writing skill rather for granted. Alone in the woods she felt the slow tides of her talent thrusting her toward her destiny. The sea and the mountains beat rhythms in her mind, and the change of seasons seemed almost unbearably beautiful.

Vincent's emotions spilled out in verse; she was a regular contributor to St. Nicholas, and at fourteen she had the thrill of having a poem printed in a national magazine. She went on to win the Intercollegiate Poetry Society prize, and in her last year at Vassar her first volume of poems was published. She flashed like a meteor across the cultural and intellectual life of New York, acting with the Provincetown Players, giving dramatic readings of her poems, writing and selling to all the important magazines.

The year 1923 was memorable—she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and she married handsome, wealthy Eugen Boissevain. With him she traveled around the world soaking up impressions and ideas that she later wove into the her poems and sonnets. Tiring of the hectic pace in New York, they purchased a farm in the Berkshires and her Miss Millay found real contentment. Her poetry gained in stature as her social conscience developed, and though she was no longer the voice of rebellious youth, she wrote with a poignance and genuine poetic power that set her apart as one of the best of the contemporary poets of America.

Here is the story of a beautiful and gifted woman who defied the conventions of her day and dared to express her individuality in poems and that echoed the feelings of the young generation to which she belonged. What Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote of herself might well have been her epitaph:

My candle burns at both ends;
    It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
 It gives a lovely light!

Miss Shafter reflects that lovely light in this superb biography on an enduring genius.

From the dust jacket