A Personette Profile of Edna St. Vincent Millay

1920

Personette
By Niksah

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

Usually it is very disappointing to meet a poet, especially one whose work you like, because it is very hard indeed for the poet to live up to your preconceived ideal of him. But no one who likes Edna St. Vincent Millay's poetry need be afraid of disillusionment in meeting her. She is beautiful, with red-gold hair, blue eyes, a face of delicate curves, and a quick, childlike smile.

Your first thought on meeting Miss Millay is that she is much too young to have written her poetry. Her first book, "Renascence," seems to have come from a life of much suffering and wide experience. And yet she wrote the title poem, which created such a furor when it was published, when she was only nineteen years old. Later she sent it off to a poetry contest.

One afternoon she had been out picking blueberries near her home in Camden, Maine, and when she came back with a big tin pail, full of them, her mother met her with a letter, saying that her poem was one of the first five chosen and praising it most enthusiastically. It was then that she decided to be a poet in all earnestness.

Much of Miss Millay's work strikes a wistful note, some of it is really tragical and some ironical. But her personality is a very gay one. She likes music, the outdoors, and the sea. She likes to swim. Strangest of all, she loves mathematics! If she couldn't be a poet she would be a mathematician. And she has just finished writing a sonnet to Euclid!

"Don't you hate anything at all?" she was asked. She thought a moment, and then answered seriously and emphatically, "Yes. I hate and loathe chocolate éclairs!"

—The Evening Gazette, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, January 14, 1920, page 8.