Authors

American · 1892–1950

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American poet whose formal brilliance, emotional directness, and personal charisma made her the defining female voice of American poetry in the 1920s. Her debut poem 'Renascence' (written at nineteen) caused a sensation; she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for The Harp-Weaver. She lived openly as a bisexual woman in Greenwich Village, and her erotic sonnets ('I, being born a woman and distressed') were read as declarations of female sexual autonomy. She also wrote the libretto for Deems Taylor's opera The King's Henchman (1927).