Modern Library Classics

"These are the poems that made Edna St. Vincent Millay’s reputation when she was young. Saucy, insolent, flip, and defiant, her little verses sting the page," writes Nancy Milford in the Introduction to The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. As one of America’s most beloved poets–and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1923–Millay defined a generation with her intoxicating voice of liberation. Most remembered for her passionate, lyrical voice and mastery of the sonnet form, Millay explores love, death, and nature in her poetry while deftly employing allusions to the classical and the romantic. In 1917, at the age of twenty, she burst onto the New York literary scene with the publication of her first book of poetry, Renascence and Other Poems, which is included in this volume.

Edited by Millay biographer Nancy Milford, The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay also includes the collections A Few Figs from Thistles and Second April, as well as "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver" and eight of Millay’s sonnets from the early twenties.