By then one biographer noted that Millay, an ardent feminist, had “led a life of personal and sexual freedom generally reserved only for men in our society.” In 1923, at age thirty-one, she received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Millay spectacularly debuted on the literary stage in 1912 with her coming-of-age poem “Renascence.” A graduate of Vassar, she was openly bisexual and led a bohemian life among the literati in New York City’s Greenwich Village starting in 1917. “She seems to have caught more flak from the literary critics for supporting democracy than Ezra Pound did for championing fascism.”īorn in 1892, Millay’s early years were one of extreme poverty. Millay authorized the poem to be printed and distributed “free of royalty, all proceeds of sale being turned over to the Red Cross or some similar war relief agency.” And she cogently asks: “Of grave concern to free men all: Can Freedom stand? – Must Freedom fall?” And after calling for her countrymen to send arms and supplies to the allies, she concludes with the warning: In it, Millay proceeds to chide, shame, and expose the shortsightedness and moral bankruptcy of the isolationists’ “quibbling and squabbling” position. Lines Written in Passion and in Deep Concern for Her response was a sonnet whose title and subtitle threw down the gauntlet in a clarion call to action: concludes the book by saying that there is no resisting the wave of the future.” Millay had had enough. Nazis and Fascists and Communism are all expressions of the wave. Arthur Schlesinger said that the book posited that “democracy is dying and the wave of the future is coming. The tipping point for her occurred in early 1940 when she read The Wave of the Futureby Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of famous aviator and isolationist Charles Lindbergh. A pacifist during World War I, in the years leading up to World War II she had watched with growing alarm the events in Europe and Asia and experienced a growing distaste for the isolationism still gripping much of the nation. That same day, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean in New York City, readers of the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, and the Daily News were surprised to find in their papers a sonnet written by America’s foremost female poet Edna St.

On June 14, 1940, German troops entered Paris.

Edna st vincent millay poems renascence