Description

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Praised by poets and critics ranging from A. E. Housman and Thomas Hardy to Edmund Wilson, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s bold, exquisite poems take their place among the enduring verse of the twentieth century
 
Claiming a lyric tradition stretching back to Sappho and Catullus and making it very much her own, Millay won over her contemporaries—and readers ever since—with her passion, erotic candor, formal elegance, and often mischievous wit. J. D. McClatchy's introduction and selections offer new and surprising insights into Millay's achievement.
 
Included are her most beloved and justly admired poems, such as the wry bohemian anthem “Recuerdo” and the sonnet sequence “Fatal Interview”, the poetic record of a love affair that is presented in its entirety. McClatchy has also chosen works that extend our sense of Millay’s range: translations, her play Aria da Capo, and excerpts from her libretto The King’s Henchman.
 
“I have for the most part been guided by my taste for Millay at her tautest and truest," writes McClatchy. "There are precise and resonant images everywhere.”
 
About the American Poets Project
Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

About the Author

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Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in 1892 in Rockland, Maine, and grew up in the seaside town of Camden. In 1923 Millay received the second annual Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Millay published five more collections of poetry; a prose collection under her pen name, Nancy Boyd; a translation; two verse dramas; and several plays. She died in 1950.

J. D. McClatchy (1945–2018) was the author of many books of poetry and essays, including Plundered Hearts: New and Selected Poems (2014), and the editor of nine Library of America publications. He wrote the libretto for Ned Rorem’s operatic version of Our Town, taught at Yale University, and served as editor of The Yale Review. 

Praise For…

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“McClatchy has done yeoman’s work with both selection and editing, and Library of America was right to inaugurate its American Poets Project with Edna St. Vincent Millay. Fashions in literature, like those in couture, keep coming back, as she, if she hasn’t already, surely will.” —John Simon, The New Criterion