Edna St. Vincent Millay

📖 The Scoop

This centenary sampling of Millay's lyrics, containing 130-odd selections, aims to show why she was once deemed a major American poet and why today's readers ought to reassess her. Millay was a verse technician of high quality, and her virtuosity with the sonnet, which she wrote in a variety of meters, remains a verse lover's delight. The variety of her poetic manners, running from philosophical meditations to wry and brillant squibs at the expense of romance to precise work-pictures as concrete and conversationally immediate as those of William Carlos Williams, is impressive. But compared to her academically fashionable contemporaries--Stevens, Pound, Eliot--she is candid and apparent. Though she sometimes doesn't have anything to say worth hearing, she says it so memorably that her status as a major-minor American poet is indisputable. ISBN 0-06-016733-5: $17.95.

Genre: Poetry / General (fancy, right?)