Women of Every Complexion and Complexity
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  • Rachel and Elizabeth Knaggs
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  • Loyalist Lucy Flucker Meets Patriot Henry Knox at a Boston Parade
  • Queen Maria Amelia, the Last Queen of Portugal, Stood Her Ground
  • The Lady and the Patriot: Theodosia Burr Alston's Fateful Voyage
  • Margaret Agnew Blennerhassett - More Character Than Riches
  • Florence Nightingale- Nurse, Feminist, Statistician, Author
  • Mary Todd Lincoln Considered April Her "Season of Sadness"
  • Mrs. Santa Claus - A Strong and Supportive Woman for All Seasons
  • Elizabeth Turner McCormick, Woman Voyager
  • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Fought for Human Rights
  • Mary Fields, Stage Coach Mail Driver, Sharp Shooter, Faithful Friend
  • Lucy Parsons, "More Dangerous Than A Thousand Rioters"
  • Lydia Maria Francis Child Travels 'Over the River and Through the Wood'
  • Anti-Suffragists Believed Women Didn't Need the Right to Vote
  • Finland's Alexandra Gripenberg Sought Universal Women's Rights
  • From Frances Slocum to Little Bear Woman and Back Again
  • Madame Elisabeth Thible is the First Woman to Ride in a Free Floating Balloon
  • Veronica Kerler Frank Pined for Germany, But Made Milwaukee Her Home
  • Mary Humphreys Stamps, Undefeated Rebel with An Educational Cause
  • Sister Monica Is One of Milwaukee, Wisconsin's Early Pioneers
  • A Love Story for St. Valentine's Day - Marie Antoinette and Count Axel von Fersen
  • Three Wisconsin Women of the Waves
  • Margaret Fox Kane and her Victorian Love Story
  • Francoise Marie Jacquelin, Lioness of La Tour, Lioness of Acadia, Woman in Her Own Right
  • Mary Breckinridge, Circuit Riding Nurse and Founder of the Frontier Nursing Service
  • Women Bicyclists Break Their Glass Cages and Ride into Liberation
  • Maria Mitchell, America's First Woman Astronomer Demonstrated Female Scientific Aptitude
  • Queen Alexandra of Great Britain-Queen Victoria's Daughter-in-Law, Bertie's Patient Wife, and Her Own Person!
  • Chicagoan Kate Kellogg Meets a Ghost on a Train
  • Isobel Lillian Steele Went to a Party and Ended Up in a Nazi Jail
  • Madam Sophie Blanchard - "Official Aeronaut of the Restoration"
  • Women of Their Time and Place
    • Nadine Turchin Fights Alongside Her Husband in the Civil War
    • War Stories Along Lake Erie: Ordinary Women Experience the War of 1812
    • Katie Walker Tends Robbins Reef Light Near the Statue of Liberty
    • Maria Gulovich Joined the Czech Resistance
    • Pirate Fanny Campbell Freed Her Fiance and Fought the British
    • SOE Agent Andree Borrel Lived Several Lifetimes in Her 24 Years
    • Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt and the First Mississippi River Steamboat
    • Sophie Kwiatkowski Served as a New Guinea Nurse in World War II
    • Clara Zetkin Spoke Against Hitler in the German Reichstag
    • Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, Female Fuhrer, Breathed Her Nazi Beliefs
    • Nancy Leo , the Only Woman Buried in Luxembourg American Cemetery
    • Dickey Chapelle, Journalist and War Correspondent
    • Lucena Brockway Adapts to Life in the Keweenaw Copper Mining Country of Lake Superior
    • Does Mary Surrat's Ghost Haunt the Senate Chambers Seeking Justice?
    • The Ghostly Cyclist in Brooklyn's Prospect Park
  • Women of Contemporary 20th and 21st Century Complexion
    • Clara Ward Chimay, Gilded Age Princess
    • Ruth Becker's Faith Helps Her Survive the Titanic and Beyond
    • Mildred Beltmann , Wartime Wife
    • The Courage of their Cultural Convictions - Women Missionaries in China
    • Light and Radiance - Laurence Owen and Her Sabena Fellow Travelers
    • Edna St. Vincent Millay, Passionate Poet, Candle-Lit Feminist
    • Fascinating Footnote: The Goose Down Divorce
    • Olive Higgins Prouty Juggles to Balance Home and Career
    • Mother and Daughter Journalists Agnes Meyer and Katharine Graham Shaped Journalism
    • Rose Friedman and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
    • Katharine Meyer Graham Leaves Her Mark on the Washington Post
    • Ida M. Tarbell, "Bachelor Soul," Transitional Woman, or Both?
    • Nurse Edith Cavell, the Courage to Die for Her Country
    • Sigrid Schultz Outsmarted Hermann Goering
    • Martha Dickie Sharp Saves Jewish Refugees from the Nazi Death Machine
    • Virginia Graham Pioneered in Early Television and Survived Cancer
    • Rose Conway, President Harry Truman's Secret Weapon
    • Nancy Green, Talented Entrepreneur, Transitional Symbol
    • "Surrender on Demand:" The Friendship of Mary Jayne Gold and Miriam Ebel
    • Julia K. Tibbitts - Closet Environmentalist
    • Lee Lawrence Ansberry Reconquers the World and Reshapes Her Life
  • Christmas Cheer

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Passionate Poet, Candle-Lit Feminist

Picture
Edna St. Vincent Millay in “The First Fig” suggests to both men and women
that their lives should be self-regulated candles.


My candle burns at both ends, /It will not last the night, /But ah my foes and oh my friends, /It gives a lovely light! Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay positioned this poem first and titled it "The First Fig" in her 1922 book of poems called, A Few Figs From Thistles. The poem expresses the dual nature of human beings and the brevity of human life. It is a symbol of the inner and outer journeys that all people take-one end of the candle the soul and the other end of the candle the outward reflection of the soul.

"My Candle Burns At Both Ends..."

"My candle burns at both ends" is an Eighteenth Century phrase that Nathan Bailey defined literally in his Dictionarium Britannicum, 1730. Candles were so valuable that the idea of lighting both ends immediately suggested reckless waste because candles could only be lit at both ends when they were held horizontally, which caused them to drip
and burn out quickly.


In the Eighteenth Century the candle burning at both ends symbolized a husband at one end, and a wife on the other, an interpretation that matched Eighteenth Century society’s perception of a woman’s role. Time transcended and transformed the meaning of a candle burning at both ends to symbolize a person ceaselessly working both day and night. In the Eighteenth and Nineteenth century women were usually the ones who worked around the clock.

Edna St. Vincent Millay learned early about dual societal roles and working around the clock. Born in Rockland, Maine, on February 22, 1892, she lived in a house between mountain and sea bookends and the dual scents of herbs drying on the porch mingling with smell of the piney woods. Her father Henry Millay, a schoolteacher, and her mother Cora Buzelle Millay, divorced after several years of marriage, leaving Edna and her two sisters Norma and Kathleen to live in genteel but not intellectual poverty.

In this late Nineteenth Century, women had managed to fan the flames of their individual candles to burn brighter. The progressive spirit of feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and thousands of anonymous women who worked across the country for women’s rights had stirred winds of change that swirled around the world and swept in the ideas of suffrage and equality. "Vincent" as her family called Edna, inhaled some of these winds.

Edna, her mother Cora, and her sisters settled in Camden, Maine, in a house that Cora’s aunt owned. In Camden, Edna began to write the poetry and plays that would earn her literary fame. At age 14, she won the St. Nicholas Gold Badge for poetry, the first of her many literary accolades.

"It Will Not Last The Night..."

By the time she turned 18, Edna had finished the first part of "Renascence," her first long poem and at age 20, she had completed the poem and ascenceentered it in a poetry contest in The Lyric Year. "Renascence" won fourth place, but both the judges and other contestants felt that it deserved first place, including the first place winner Orrick Johns.

After the contest controversy, Caroline B. Dow, Dean of the New York Y.W.C.A. Training School, heard Edna reciting her poetry and playing the piano at the Whitehall Inn in Camden, Maine, and she offered to pay for Edna’s education at Vassar College. At age 21, Edna entered Vassar and after she graduated in 1917, she moved to New York to live in Greenwich Village. In 1923 at age 22, Edna won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for The Harp-Weaver.

As Edna St. Vincent Millay grew older, she developed a fierce independence and a feminist perspective as well as an unapologetic bi-sexuality. In 1923, Edna St. Vincent Millay married Eugen Boissevain, widower of Inez Milholland who had died of pernicious anemia in 1916. Inez Milholland had been a tireless suffragist, labor lawyer, World War I correspondent, and influential activist in the women’s movement in America, and Edna meshed with this tradition.

Living their own interpretation of the candle ends symbolism of marriage, Edna and Eugen lived like two bachelors, remaining "sexually open" all through their twenty-six-year marriage. Eugen Boissevain successfully managed Edna’s literary career, setting up readings and public appearances for her. Edna and Eugen spent most of their married life at Steepletop, their home in Austerlitz, New York.

"But Ah My Foes and Oh My Friends..."

After a period of living a Bohemian, "flaming youth" in Greenwich Village, Edna St. Vincent Millay increasingly turned her vision toward the nation and the world, as if she realized that eventually flaming youth extinguishes itself and middle and old age must continue to feed the fire.

In her later years, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s work focused on the inner and outer journeys of both people and nations. She became truly connected to her soul and her work reflected the connection while she continued to live out her feminist principles.

The execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian anarchists from South Braintree, Massachusetts, who were tried and convicted-many historians feel unjustly- of robbery and murder, drew near in the summer of 1927. Still burning the candle at both ends, Edna fought for their lives. She contributed a poem that she called "Justice Denied in Massachusetts," to the fund for their defense campaign, and she also personally appealed to the governor of Massachusetts.

In August 1927, the Boston police arrested poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay, playwright John Howard Lawson, William Patterson of the American Negro Congress and other "death watch" demonstrators in Boston. Edna had expected to be arrested and when she returned to New York she said, "Some of us have been thinking and talking too long without doing anything. Poems are perfect; picketing sometimes, is better."

Edna St. Vincent Millay also published three verse plays and she wrote the libretto for The King’s Henchman, one of the few American grand operas.

In 1940, Edna published an argument against isolationism in The New York Times Magazine, arguing that "There are no islands anymore." During World War II, she wrote about the Nazi massacre of Lidice, a Czechoslovak village that the Nazi’s eradicated in retaliation for the supposed involvement of the villagers in the murder of SS Leader Reinhard Heydrich. She wrote, "The whole world holds in its arms today, The murdered village of Lidice, Like the murdered body of a little child, Innocent, happy, surprised at play."

"It Gives A Lovely Light"

Eugen Boissevain died in 1949, and Edna St. Vincent Millay followed him in 1950. Women have been burning the candle at both ends and giving an often unrecognized lovely light throughout history. Edna St. Vincent Millay's life leaves a lighted literary path to this truth and reminds women that they must continue to burn their candle flames to refine and
redefine their candlestick grip on human rights.


References

Millay, Norma, editor.Collected Poems: Edna St. Vincent Millay.(Harper & Row, 1956.

McClatchy, J.D., editor.Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems American Poets Project, 7: Library of America, 2003.

Epstein, Daniel Mark. What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay .Henry Holt & Company, 2001.

Milford, Nancy.Nancy Milford. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House, 2001.

Meade, Marion. Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties. Doubleday, 2004.|

 

 


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All of the material on this website is copyrighted.  You are free to link to any of the articles and to download any of the PDF books to read and use as long as you credit me as the author.       kathywarnes@gmail.com
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  • Home
  • Women's Rooms
    • Womens Rooms-Anne
    • Womens Rooms-Abigail
    • The Dead Baby in a Blue Blanket: The
    • Rena Rides the Raindrops
  • Women at Work-Blog
  • E Books and Print Books for Sale
  • Women of Historical Complexion
  • Rachel and Elizabeth Knaggs
  • Elizabeth Stiles, President Lincoln's Spy
  • Loyalist Lucy Flucker Meets Patriot Henry Knox at a Boston Parade
  • Queen Maria Amelia, the Last Queen of Portugal, Stood Her Ground
  • The Lady and the Patriot: Theodosia Burr Alston's Fateful Voyage
  • Margaret Agnew Blennerhassett - More Character Than Riches
  • Florence Nightingale- Nurse, Feminist, Statistician, Author
  • Mary Todd Lincoln Considered April Her "Season of Sadness"
  • Mrs. Santa Claus - A Strong and Supportive Woman for All Seasons
  • Elizabeth Turner McCormick, Woman Voyager
  • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Fought for Human Rights
  • Mary Fields, Stage Coach Mail Driver, Sharp Shooter, Faithful Friend
  • Lucy Parsons, "More Dangerous Than A Thousand Rioters"
  • Lydia Maria Francis Child Travels 'Over the River and Through the Wood'
  • Anti-Suffragists Believed Women Didn't Need the Right to Vote
  • Finland's Alexandra Gripenberg Sought Universal Women's Rights
  • From Frances Slocum to Little Bear Woman and Back Again
  • Madame Elisabeth Thible is the First Woman to Ride in a Free Floating Balloon
  • Veronica Kerler Frank Pined for Germany, But Made Milwaukee Her Home
  • Mary Humphreys Stamps, Undefeated Rebel with An Educational Cause
  • Sister Monica Is One of Milwaukee, Wisconsin's Early Pioneers
  • A Love Story for St. Valentine's Day - Marie Antoinette and Count Axel von Fersen
  • Three Wisconsin Women of the Waves
  • Margaret Fox Kane and her Victorian Love Story
  • Francoise Marie Jacquelin, Lioness of La Tour, Lioness of Acadia, Woman in Her Own Right
  • Mary Breckinridge, Circuit Riding Nurse and Founder of the Frontier Nursing Service
  • Women Bicyclists Break Their Glass Cages and Ride into Liberation
  • Maria Mitchell, America's First Woman Astronomer Demonstrated Female Scientific Aptitude
  • Queen Alexandra of Great Britain-Queen Victoria's Daughter-in-Law, Bertie's Patient Wife, and Her Own Person!
  • Chicagoan Kate Kellogg Meets a Ghost on a Train
  • Isobel Lillian Steele Went to a Party and Ended Up in a Nazi Jail
  • Madam Sophie Blanchard - "Official Aeronaut of the Restoration"
  • Women of Their Time and Place
    • Nadine Turchin Fights Alongside Her Husband in the Civil War
    • War Stories Along Lake Erie: Ordinary Women Experience the War of 1812
    • Katie Walker Tends Robbins Reef Light Near the Statue of Liberty
    • Maria Gulovich Joined the Czech Resistance
    • Pirate Fanny Campbell Freed Her Fiance and Fought the British
    • SOE Agent Andree Borrel Lived Several Lifetimes in Her 24 Years
    • Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt and the First Mississippi River Steamboat
    • Sophie Kwiatkowski Served as a New Guinea Nurse in World War II
    • Clara Zetkin Spoke Against Hitler in the German Reichstag
    • Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, Female Fuhrer, Breathed Her Nazi Beliefs
    • Nancy Leo , the Only Woman Buried in Luxembourg American Cemetery
    • Dickey Chapelle, Journalist and War Correspondent
    • Lucena Brockway Adapts to Life in the Keweenaw Copper Mining Country of Lake Superior
    • Does Mary Surrat's Ghost Haunt the Senate Chambers Seeking Justice?
    • The Ghostly Cyclist in Brooklyn's Prospect Park
  • Women of Contemporary 20th and 21st Century Complexion
    • Clara Ward Chimay, Gilded Age Princess
    • Ruth Becker's Faith Helps Her Survive the Titanic and Beyond
    • Mildred Beltmann , Wartime Wife
    • The Courage of their Cultural Convictions - Women Missionaries in China
    • Light and Radiance - Laurence Owen and Her Sabena Fellow Travelers
    • Edna St. Vincent Millay, Passionate Poet, Candle-Lit Feminist
    • Fascinating Footnote: The Goose Down Divorce
    • Olive Higgins Prouty Juggles to Balance Home and Career
    • Mother and Daughter Journalists Agnes Meyer and Katharine Graham Shaped Journalism
    • Rose Friedman and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
    • Katharine Meyer Graham Leaves Her Mark on the Washington Post
    • Ida M. Tarbell, "Bachelor Soul," Transitional Woman, or Both?
    • Nurse Edith Cavell, the Courage to Die for Her Country
    • Sigrid Schultz Outsmarted Hermann Goering
    • Martha Dickie Sharp Saves Jewish Refugees from the Nazi Death Machine
    • Virginia Graham Pioneered in Early Television and Survived Cancer
    • Rose Conway, President Harry Truman's Secret Weapon
    • Nancy Green, Talented Entrepreneur, Transitional Symbol
    • "Surrender on Demand:" The Friendship of Mary Jayne Gold and Miriam Ebel
    • Julia K. Tibbitts - Closet Environmentalist
    • Lee Lawrence Ansberry Reconquers the World and Reshapes Her Life
  • Christmas Cheer