“A reputation is a merciless thing,” notes the poet and dramatist Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) in her diary of 1913. Then just twenty-one, Millay had already achieved literary renown with the publication of a brilliant long poem, “Renascence,” but soon she would become a celebrity, famous both for her Byronic exploits and for her writing. Ten years after this pronouncement, she would become the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize.
Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay is the first publication of Millay’s diaries, which range from the lyric to the prosaic to the horrific, and which Millay emphatically did not intend for public consumption (annotations in her hand show that she did return to them for her own purposes). For decades accessible only to scholars, they eventually fell under the stewardship of the Library of Congress. Editor Daniel Mark Epstein turned to the diaries as a primary source for his 2002 biography of Millay, What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. An unabashed Millay supporter, Epstein has long argued that her poetic gifts have been unjustly overlooked (a summary of critical consensus might read like the comments one of Millay’s professors offered on Millay’s English theme: “Full of feeling, verging on sentimentality, but with some pathos. Not particularly healthy. Technically good”). In his commentary, Epstein treats the writer’s personal weaknesses with sensitivity, her triumphs with enthusiasm.
Millay was not an unflagging diarist, and so Rapture and Melancholy cannot offer an unbroken biographical or narrative arc. After her first semester, there are no extant diaries for Millay’s legendary expulsion-courting years at Vassar, nor any regular entries in the early 1920s, when she published the collections that won her the Pulitzer. The bulk of the entries Epstein has selected for inclusion fall from about 1907–1913 and 1927–1935, with gaps even within those periods. Prior familiarity with at least the rough contours of Millay’s life and work will certainly benefit readers, though Epstein prefaces each section of Rapture and Melancholy with commentary and biographical highlights, and endnotes briefly identify now-obscure people, places, and works that Millay mentions.
This volume will be of particular interest to Millay enthusiasts, of course, and to scholars of early 20th-century literature and culture. Writers may relate to Millay’s professional struggles: getting lost in a poem and neglecting other work; her frustration when administrative tasks preempt writing time (Millay was a Guggenheim reader later in her career); her “hours of anxiety & distress” over having to give an unexpected radio address; the ensuing awkwardness when a friend admits to thinking her new poems are not any good.
And Rapture and Melancholy, particularly in its first half, will also appeal to general readers interested in the unfiltered workings of a lively, complicated mind. The diaries reveal a writer both insecure and imperious, convivial and lonely, kind and cruel: brilliantly and wretchedly human.
Early on (1907-1914) we find a young woman chafing at the confinement of her circumstances, and an ambitious artist working to understand her gifts. Millay grew up in Maine with two younger sisters, Norma and Kathleen, and their mother, Cora. Energetic and popular, Millay records hikes with friends, acting triumphs, dances, piano lessons, Sunday school debates. Flashes of Parkeresque wit pepper these pages: “One commendable thing about me is that I have no bad habits: which virtue is more than canceled by the fact that I have no good habits,” she notes with wry self-awareness in 1911.
Unfortunately, this self-awareness does not extend toward her own racial and ethnic prejudices. For a long stretch in these early journals, Millay addresses an imaginary Black figure based on a racist trope. Given that Millay seems unselfconscious about this racism (and later in the diaries, she makes offensive remarks that range from condescending to flatly bigoted about Poles, Jews, and Black people in the South), one wonders about the contents of the extant Japanese travel diary that is not included in this volume. On this painful subject, Epstein’s commentary — which uncomfortably compares the unpleasant housework of a white teenager in 1908 to the compelled labor of enslaved Black women in the nineteenth century — would benefit from more engagement with scholars of racism (an endnote directs readers to Melissa Harris-Perry’s Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America).
These entries do reveal a young woman desperately lonely beneath her vivacious surface — “I always make a hit with strangers because they don’t know me” — and weary. Her mother’s work as a nurse often called her away, leaving Vincent (as she preferred to be called) in charge of the laborious and time-consuming chores required to keep the house and family functioning through freezing Maine winters. Later, Millay turns to a new imaginary figure, describing her ritual incantations to draw toward herself a “love o’dreams.” Epstein takes this imaginary lover as an “empowering spirit” as well as a man, but perhaps Millay was merely recognizing that marriage was one way to escape the confines of her town and family. Although she had already won prizes and accolades for her poems, the spectacular success of “Renascence,” which would bring her fame and patronage and a train ticket to New York, was still in the future.
Meanwhile, the young poet of the diaries keeps writing, and reflecting on her own mind: “It seems to me I can remember everything I ever did, every place I was ever in. My mind is a labyrinthian picture-gallery in which every painting is some scene from my life — vivid and distinct, even its most trivial details,” she writes. Among the typical diarist’s jottings of names and events and weather, Millay transmutes these details into lyric descriptions: “the moist, delicate green of the bark’s living” or “the broad low house clung easily to the slope of the hill. It seemed to fit there, somehow, as if under the measured hammering of the years it had relaxed, unresistingly to become at last a part of the soil on which it stood.”
Writing becomes a way of living twice, as Millay makes more explicit in a 1912 entry:
“I do not think there is a woman in whom the roots of passion shoot deeper than in me. ‘The two elements of passion are rapture and melancholy.’ It seems to me I am that incarnate — rapture and melancholy. I cannot recall a time when either one or the other was not the dominant feeling in me. I am and always have been intense. [. . .] I have never been indifferent to anything. And what life I have lived I have lived doubly, actually and symbolically”
Once Millay reaches New York, her insecurities are apparent — “Some people think I’m going to be a great poet, and I’m going to be sent to college so that I may have a chance to be great, — but I don’t know — I’m afraid — afraid I’m too — too little, I guess, to be very much, after all” — but rapture outshines melancholy. Her days are filled with cultural events, new friends and lovers, and the classes she realizes she needs as a foundation for the poems she wants to write.
These early diaries end suddenly — mid-sentence — in January 1914, just as Millay embarks on an affair with one of her Vassar classmates. Epstein speculates, quite reasonably, that a relative or Millay herself may have concealed or destroyed some notebooks whose contents were considered particularly scandalous at the time. Brief travelogues from the early 1920s follow, showing a great leap in her powers as prose stylist.
Epstein notes that calm periods produce Millay’s most regular diary entries, and this is especially evident in the later diaries, which, with some travel interludes, record life at Steepletop, the farm in eastern New York State that Millay and her husband, Eugen Boissevain, purchased in the 1920s. Amid late spring snows, the bustle of planting and transplanting (both Vincent and Eugen were enthusiastic gardeners), blooming and birdwatching, Millay chronicles visits from friends, the antics of runaway dogs, a fast-moving fire that destroys her writing shack. Her keen powers of observation result in arresting lyric descriptions: frog eggs in a pond are “coiled like the small intestine”; an unknown noise is a “strange sound like a whiskey-drinking dove.” One day, she sees “six scarlet tanagers in the dragon-willow, magnificent sight. So brilliant in the sun they were almost too dazzling to look at; they seemed incandescent, six small Holy Grails.”
Her insouciant wit is still evident as she gives herself a pep talk on flying in 1934: “you might as well [. . .] relax and ride the bumps like a lady and a scholar and a sailor, and think about poetry, or think about your lovers, or fall asleep.” Those persons who would censure and censor her friend Elinor Wylie for her extramarital affairs (which both Millay and Eugen conducted, too, with each other’s blessings) Millay dismisses with contempt as “sanctified flatfooted gadgets.”
Although Millay held progressive positions with respect to issues like contemporary sexual mores (in the diary she is completely frank about her attraction to women) and the death penalty — “a slovenly school,” she calls capital punishment, “hysterical & lazy & afraid”; she was arrested in Boston for “sauntering and loitering” as she protested the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti — these do not absolve her from prejudice, as evident in the early diaries’ casual racism, or from reprehensible cruelty. In these pages Millay, always proud of her own slender figure, repeatedly mocks the size of her typist. Despite her experience with the labor housekeeping requires, she writes in 1927, “The only people I really hate are servants,” continuing, with vituperative hyperbole, “They are not really human beings at all. They have no conscience, no heart, no sense of responsibility [. . .] Even their sins are not human sins but the sins of spiders & magpies, of monkeys serpents [sic] & pigs.”
Epstein reads this “frightening” entry as evidence of a change in Millay’s personality, aligning with her increased use of alcohol and morphine during this period, though illness and pain are no excuse for malice. In the rest of the diaries, Millay never expresses shame or regret for these words or attitudes, which is even more remarkable since from 1927 onward, her diaries were not entirely private: Eugen recorded entries when Millay was not well enough to write.
In addition to suffering from injuries that included an excruciating corneal scratch in 1927 and lingering nerve pain after a car accident in 1936, Millay was chronically ill. (It’s been speculated that she had inflammatory bowel disease, though I rather wonder, given some of her surgeries and symptoms, whether endometriosis has ever been considered.) Her suffering caused her to seek relief with alcohol and medications, primarily morphine, to which she became dangerously addicted. In a truly harrowing and heartbreaking late entry, Millay, to spare her husband from distress, orders herself to conceal her overwhelming physical pain: “even when every deep, proper breath is like the thrusting in and wrigglingly drawing out of a Javanese kris under my shoulder-blade. DON’T WHINE!”
“Forget that you exist,” she writes. Already she was fading from public view. Soon the diary entries become careful records — sometimes near hourly — of drug dosages. Epstein provides only a sampling of these notebooks, which the poet’s sister Norma hid inside the Steepletop piano for decades after Millay’s death.
In the last entry in Rapture and Melancholy, about a year and a half before her death in 1950, Millay notes the appearance of rabbits whose fur is not brown but gray, like that of the deer she’d noticed the day before, “sort of mortified and moth-eaten.” In this evocative alliteration it is good to hear the poet’s voice once more, though the image is all too sadly apt.
[Published by Yale University Press on March 8, 2022, 416 pages. $35.00 hardcover. Edited by Daniel Mark Epstein with a Foreword by Holly Peppe]