At Vassar, she was the most notorious girl on campus, famous for both her poetry and her habit of breaking rules. Vassar's president, Henry Noble McCracken, once wrote to her, "You couldn't break any rule that would make me vote for your expulsion. I don't want a banished Shelley on my doorstep." She wrote back, "Well, on those terms I think I can continue to live in this hellhole."
She started sending her poems off to magazine editors in New York City, and she always included a picture of herself with her submissions. She had red hair and green eyes and when she'd lived in Camden, Maine, people had often stopped and stared at her on the street, she was so beautiful. When she moved to Greenwich Village after college, most of the men in the literary scene fell in love with her, including the critic Edmund Wilson, who proposed to her and never got over her rejection. He wrote about her in his novel I Thought of Daisy (1929).
Millay wrote poems about bohemian parties and free love in her collection A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), and she became one of the icons of the Jazz Age. When she gave readings of her poetry, she drew huge crowds of adoring fans. She recited her poetry from memory, delivering the poems with her whole body. Many critics considered her the greatest poet of her generation. The poet Thomas Hardy famously said that America had produced only two great things: the skyscraper and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. She became the first woman poet to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.
But after her marriage, she began to suffer from debilitating stomach pains, and she became addicted to morphine. By the end of her life, her poetry had fallen out of fashion. She died in 1950, at the age of fifty-eight, after falling down the steps in the middle of the night.
Millay wrote, "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!"
Writer's Almanac
