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The Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

             Vincent Millay, was an American poet of the twentieth century. She was born in Rockland, Maine on February 22, 1982. In 1904, Edna's parents, who had been separated for three years, finalized the end of their marriage with a divorce. After the divorce, Edna and her two sisters, Norma and Kathleen, along with their mother Cora, moved from town to town, as her mother attempted to make a better life for her daughters. Failing to achieve any level of financial success, Cora Millay and her children eventually fell into poverty. .
             Edna St. Vincent Millay suffered from her parents divorce, and the pain of her childhood became a major influence on the content and style of her writing. With an original voice, Millay typically wrote about the dark and tumultuous aspects of love. She was openly bisexual - a shocking and fearless proclamation for a woman of that era. Despite her sexual leanings, she married Eugen Boissevain in 1923, claiming, after 26 years of marriage, that she and her Eugen were able to remain married due to their sexually open relationship. Eugen Boissevain died of lung cancer in 1949, followed soon after by Edna in 1950. .
             Love Is Not All.
             Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink.
             Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;  .
             Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink  .
             And rise and sink and rise and sink again;  .
             Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,  .
             Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;  .
             Yet many a man is making friends with death  .
             Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.  .
             It well may be that in a difficult hour,  .
             Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,  .
             Or nagged by want past resolution's  power,  .
             I might be driven to sell your love for peace,  .
             Or trade the memory of this night for food.  .
             It well may be. I do not think I would.
             Dark Aspect of Love.
             Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote "Love is not all " when she was thirty nine, in 1931. This poem is more of a mirror image of Edna Millay's life.


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