I only know that summer sang in me a little while......

books:

	• What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay Daniel Mark Epstein Holt Paperbacks, 2002 - 328 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Edna St. Vincent Millay

This is an intimate portrait of Millay that I cherish. It is also a valuble historical account of many aspects of Maine life. The location and circumstances of Millay's estranged father and the inhabitants of the small town of Kingman in Northern Penobscot County are invaluable in my research of the area. Henry Millay lived in my house in Kingman and no doubt some of Vincent's work was conceived, if not written from my house. It is this connection which has led to my current collection of Millay's work and life. Thank you for this offering on your invaluable site.

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The best so far

This is simply a great biography.

Apparently Epstein was able to gain access to a vast Library of Congress collection of documents on Millay that won't be released to the public until 2010. And he seems to have done an unusually good job of sorting through all this information and putting it in order.

Perhaps it's due to Epstein being a poet himself, but he's able to give a wonderfully sensitive and intelligent account of Millay's life. He's done lots of detective work, and it seems to all hold together.

It's an unbelievable story -- so American in some ways: the gilded age to ragtime to the Jazz Age, the World Wars, anti-war and women's rights, passion, poetry, Greenwich Village and the Left Bank, genius, narcissism, money, fame, sex, alcohol, drugs, a skyrocket ride from poverty to success to destruction.

And yet so un-American in its calm, well-behaved, almost English manner: no shooting, no fist-fights, no one calling the cops, a time when books of poetry sold 50,000 copies and folks jam-packed auditoriums to hear poetry readings -- think Bloomsbury secretly on meth and Virginia Woolf quietly dedicating herself to nymphomania.

Really a well-written book, and surely the best biography of Millay so far.

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I only know that summer sang in me a little while......

A well written, passionate story about a complicated , passionate woman.
Full of love, lust, and poetry that grabs your heart. Yes, the author of this book was in love with his subject.

A Poet's Life Unfurled

It's not easy being a poet, and Daniel Mark Epstein's biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay in What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, confirms this. From love affairs with men and women to excessive drinking, this book has it all.
However, there were some things in the book that could have been elaborated on. For example, Epstein had my attention from the very first chapters about Millay's young life as a poet. He mentions how she would conduct candlelight seances in her rooms at night, and would use them as inspiration to write her poetry. He also mentions how close she was with her mother, Cora. I think Epstein should have gone into further detail on both Millay's life as a young poet, and her relationship to her mother. Instead, the book focuses on her love affairs with many men (and a few with some of the women she met at Vassar), as well as the ups and downs she experienced within these relationships and within her life as a poet. Now granted, the book might not be successful if it tried to incorporate the points I would have liked to have seen, but I think especially concerning Millay's feelings of great love for her mother, it might make the book a stronger one.
What I admired about the book was the feeling I got of Epstein's concern as a present-day writer looking into Millay's steady decline as poet throughout. As a reader, I sensed a certain kind of admiration and esteem for her in the tone of the book, especially at the start of her career as a writer. I was saddened at the end of the book to learn that Millay died from an intake of too much alcohol as well as a fall from her steps. Epstein's concern at the end, too, only strengthened my view that poets do not lead the kinds of high-roller lives that people would like to believe they do.
When I finished the book, I found myself wanting to know more of the sensitive and acclaimed poet. I wanted to know what drew her so much to alcohol and morphine that she was so wont to abuse. I wanted to know why exactly her husband Eugen's reasoning was in briefly trying morphine in an attempt to make her realize that morphine was indeed not the solution to her problems. I wanted to know what Millay's reasoning was in having extra-marital affairs with other men while being married to Eugen. And I wanted to know more about Millay's sisters; why Kathleen went mad, and why she seemed to stay more in touch with her other sister, Norma, more than Kathleen. I wanted more answers than I got from reading this book.
In short, while this book is interesting and well-organized, it does not offer a complete look into Millay's psyche and way of perceiving her world. It is most probably a book that would support research done on the poet's life, rather than being a book that can stand on its own. If you want to read a book about Millay's love affairs, read this book. If you want to read about her life as a whole, look elsewhere.

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Pure Poetry

Catching up on my Amazon reviews (only about 300 books behind)---been a big fan of Millay since my first reading of Renascence (a favorite poem). Millay was a personality before there were magazines and 24/7 coverage of a celebrities every move---no doubt she would have been good fodder for these purveyors of the lives of others. Ms. Millay lived on the edge and her talent was equalled by a life lived large. Mr. Epstein captured this exceptionally woman beautifully in his well-written biography.
Highly recommended.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

This is the story of a rare sort of American genius, who grew up in grinding poverty in Camden, Maine. Nothing could save the sensitive child but her talent for words, music, and drama, and an inexorable desire to be loved. When she was twenty, her poetry would make her famous; at thirty she would be loved by readers the world over.Edna St. Vincent Millay was widely considered to be the most seductive woman of her age. Few men could resist her, and many women also fell under her spell. From the publication of her first poems until the scandal over Fatal Interview twenty years later, gossip about the poet's liberated lifestyle prompted speculation about who might be the real subject of her verses.Using letters, diaries, and journals of the poet and her lovers that have only recently become available, Daniel Mark Epstein tells the astonishing story of the life, dedicated to art and love, that inspired the sublime lyrics of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

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