Thursday, February 22, 2018

Good idea …

 Edna St Vincent Millay's poetry has been eclipsed by her personal life – let's change that | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Where should one begin with Millay? She had a famed predilection for Petrarchan sonnets and rhyming couplets, at odds with prominent experimental modernists of the era, such as TS Eliot and Wallace Stevens. But Millay expanded the scope of these poetic forms, presenting a bold, sexually charged vision of the female experience. Her verses serve as a kind of elaborate architecture, housing the fickle, frenetic movements of the heart that falls in love and then out of it. Renascence and other poems (1917), which includes the 200-plus line poem that brought her acclaim, also boasts six sonnets, all of which are outstanding in this respect.
She also wrote the libretto for Deems Taylor's opera The King's Henchmen, which was quite a hit, though long a victim of our cultural amnesia.

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