My Heart: selected poems

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was a respected poet and feminist figure in the 1920s. She grew up in Maine, in a liberal home with her two sisters and divorced mother. From 1906, she had poems published in the famous children’s magazine St. Nicholas. Her fame took off at the early age of 20 when her poetry was included in The Lyric Year — bringing Millay to the attention of the benefactor who endorsed her education at Vassar College. She graduated in 1917 and moved to New York where she made a living by writing mass-appeal verse and short stories for magazines, under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd. In 1920, her work appeared in Vanity Fair. When she started suffering increasing fatigue, she was offered to go to Europe on a regular salary. She went to France in 1921, but became pregnant and moved back to New England, where her mother helped her with abortion. She married in 1923 and moved to a farmhouse in Austerlitz in 1925. During the 30s her popularity declined while she focused on supporting the war effort and on writing propaganda verse. She died of a heart attack in 1950, one year after her husband’s death.

During her lifetime she published numerous poetry collections and dramatic works, including an opera libretto. She is most known for her poetry from the interwar period; the poem The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (1923) made her the second person and first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her war writings include the collection Make Bright the Arrows (1940) and the ballad The Murder of Lidice (1942).

This edition presents a selection of poems from four poetry collections: A Few Figs from Thistles: Poems and Four Sonnets (1921), Second April (1921), The Harp-Weaver and other poems (1923), and The Buck in the Snow and other poems (1928).