Contemporary Novel

I read Selected Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay for my contemporary novel. Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine and went to college at Vassar. She wrote many poems through out her life and was highly acclaimed for them. Through her poems you can tell that Millay lived her own aspects of the American dream.
Millay liked to experience the world around her fully and she would strive for anything; in her poem Renascence she said:

“The sky I thought is not so grand;

I ‘most could touch it with my hand!

And reaching up my hand to try, 

I screamed to feel it touch the sky.”

Millay always looked for her own way of life. In her poem The Singing-Woman from the Wood’s Edge she explains how her parents differed in ideas and from then on she always made her own choices.

“And yanked both ways by my mother and my father,

With a ‘Which would you better?’ and a ‘Which would you rather?’

With him for a sire and her for a dam,

What should I be but just what I am?”

Edna Millay was a feminist and believed fully in perusing what she wanted, and she became the first woman poet to win a Pulitzer Prize. She always did as she pleased or what she thought was best. Portrait by a Neighbor shows her independence and her insistence to do only what she wanted.

“Before she has her floor swept

Or her dishes done,

Any day you’ll find her

A-sunning in the sun!

It’s long after midnight

Her key’s in the lock,

And you never see her chimney smoke

Till past ten o’clock!”

Edna St. Vincent Millay lived maybe not how most people would find decent, especially in the 1920’s; but she lived with her own ideas, beliefs, wonders and passions. Part of the American dream is to be able to live unoppressed in your customs and beliefs, which Edna Millay did and expressed in her poetry.



Source:
Selected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York, NY: Gramercy Books, 2006.