Selected Poems

This centenary edition celebrates Edna St Vincent Millay (1892-1950), one of the most popular poets of her generation and the best-known American poet of her time. Some of her achievements are, as her editor Colin Falck says, ‘unlike anything that exists elsewhere in English-language poetry’. She is a brilliantly innovative verse technician, finding latent energies in traditional forms and discovering new means of her own to express what Falck calls ‘her complex and extremely subtle feminist consciousness, her almost Blakean sense of the mysteriousness of ordinary life.’ ‘I know that Millay is a good poet,’ writes Richard Wilbur, ‘because there are so many of her lines in my memory.’ ‘She wrote some of the best sonnets of the century,’ Richard Eberhart says. Millay’s work is resistant to theory and cannot easily be adapted to modernism. Yet she has never forfeited the love of general readers and a new generation will find here the work of one of the most passionate and accomplished poets of the century.