What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay

by Daniel Mark Epstein

Book Overview

A noted biographer and poet illuminates the unique woman who wrote the greatest American love poetry of the twentieth century This is the story of a rare sort of American genius, who grew up in grinding poverty in Camden, Maine. Nothing could save the sensitive child but her talent for words, music and drama, and an inexorable desire to be loved. When she was twenty, her poetry would make her famous; at thirty she would be loved by readers the world over. Edna St. Vincent Millay was widely considered to be the most seductive woman of her age. Few men could resist her, and many women also fell under her spell. From the publication of her first poems until the scandal over Fatal Interview twenty years later, gossip about the poet's liberated lifestyle prompted speculation about who might be the real subject of her verses. Using letters, diaries and journals of the poet and her lovers that have only recently become available, Daniel Mark Epstein tells the astonishing story of the life, dedicated to art and love, that inspired the sublime lyrics of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805067272
• ISBN13: 9780805067279
• Release Date: September 2001
• Publisher: John MacRae Books
• Length: 300 Pages
• Weight: 1.43 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.6" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Edna St. Vincent Millay

This is an intimate portrait of Millay that I cherish. It is also a valuble historical account of many aspects of Maine life. The location and circumstances of Millay's estranged father and the inhabitants of the small town of Kingman in Northern Penobscot County are invaluable in my research of the area. Henry Millay lived in my house in Kingman and no doubt some of Vincent's work was conceived, if not written from my house. It is this connection which has led to my current collection of Millay's work and life. Thank you for this offering on your invaluable site.

The best so far

This is simply a great biography. Apparently Epstein was able to gain access to a vast Library of Congress collection of documents on Millay that won't be released to the public until 2010. And he seems to have done an unusually good job of sorting through all this information and putting it in order. Perhaps it's due to Epstein being a poet himself, but he's able to give a wonderfully sensitive and intelligent account of Millay's life. He's done lots of detective work, and it seems to all hold together. It's an unbelievable story -- so American in some ways: the gilded age to ragtime to the Jazz Age, the World Wars, anti-war and women's rights, passion, poetry, Greenwich Village and the Left Bank, genius, narcissism, money, fame, sex, alcohol, drugs, a skyrocket ride from poverty to success to destruction. And yet so un-American in its calm, well-behaved, almost English manner: no shooting, no fist-fights, no one calling the cops, a time when books of poetry sold 50,000 copies and folks jam-packed auditoriums to hear poetry readings -- think Bloomsbury secretly on meth and Virginia Woolf quietly dedicating herself to nymphomania. Really a well-written book, and surely the best biography of Millay so far.

Terrific reading

Daniel Mark Epstein brings a special understanding to Edna St Vincent Millay's biography by virtue of being a poet himself. I think that's why this book is in many ways superior to the Nancy Mitford book.Edna St Vincent Millay was not only a great person of words, but a great seductress and everyone, male and female alike, fell under her spell. Apparently, accordingly to this book, she managed to live up to their expectations quite well. Mr Epstein matches the love poems to the folks they were written for and gives the details of the various affairs. It may not sound interesting, but it is quite interesting - especially since M's Millay seemed to have a weakness for men who were not quite as talented as she was. The background behind "Fatal Interview" and the story of her (apparently) one love she lost before_she_ was ready to is quite an interesting read by itself.Mr Epstein focuses on M's Millay as sort of a self made goddess and how her various affairs shaped her writing. M's Mitford focuses on how M's Millay's relationship with her mother shaped her life. Both of these are very interesting and I'd advise reading them consecutively and draw your own conclusions. In some respects, I think Mr Epstein is correct in what he presumes, but the same can be said of M's Mitford.Throw yourself into the words and life of Edna St Vincent Millay - you'll find yourself awash with her beautiful poetry and prose and this book will help you make sense out of it.

What a GREAT READ!!!

This compellingly readable, lushly evocative biography focuses on the lovers and the love affairs that inspired Millay's best-known poetry. While Millay capitalized on her public image as a jazz-age "free spirit"--reckless, heedless and enjoying every minute-- her life story reads like a great, tragic Romantic novel.Millay's hardscrabble childhood in turn-of-the(20th)-century Maine is so vividly conjured in Epstein's story, you can just about smell the smoke from the cast iron stove as she careens between the crushing responsibility of caring for her younger sisters and the imaginative escape she forged through music, theater and poetry. Through a combination of sly manipulation, talent and sheer luck, Millay went from being an arty local eccentric to a national celebrity--the cynosure of the Manhattan literary scene--at the age of 20, virtually overnight. The seemingly incongruous combination of her porcelain-doll looks and unabashedly passionate (yet formally rigorous) poetry acted like catnip for her contemporaries, men and women alike: she looked like an angel, behaved like a libertine, and packed an intellectual wallop equal to that of any man. Epstein describes the compulsive pace at which, during the height of her poetic production, Millay conducted many, often simultaneous, love affairs, lavishing indifference on the legions who worshipped her image and reputation, and suffering agonizing unrequited passion for the (relatively few) others.By focusing on the most significant affairs and linking them (with impressive use of both painstaking scholarship and critical insight)to specific poems, Epstein incisively portrays the emotional pitch of the time without getting bogged down in endless lists of names, dates and locations. By crafting the narrative in this way, Epstein selects and contextualizes Millay's own words and documented actions to show--not tell-- how both physical illness and a likely manic-depressive disorder spiralled under the pressure to live up to her own legend. This is masterful storytelling, through and through.Much as she was rescued, "deus ex machina" from an small-time life in Maine by a dowager patroness, Millay was rescued again in 1923, this time from life-threatening illness and despondency by a real-life Romantic hero (a Belgian Mr. Darcy?), whom she had the good sense to marry. While he set aside his own business to support her work and to shelter her from the strain of public and critical scrutiny, their idyllic rural marriage scenario stultified her creativity. Millay's dogged pursuit (with her husband's active consent) of an affair with a reluctant younger man is affectingly portrayed as a desperate, unconsciously delusional act of self-abasement in the service of her own (fading) sexual persona and the poetry which that persona had always sponsored so reliably. And it worked: great sonnets happened, albeit at no small cost. The waning of this affair, plus a series of illnesses and accidents, provided a host

A woman poet's life, uncensored . . .

This is a marvelous account of the difficult early life, passionate love affairs, and heartbreaking physical demise of the gifted poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose journey from poverty to celebrity to alcohol and drug addiction follows a familiar and distinctively modern course.From this scrupulously researched life story, complete with previously unpublished journal entries and letters, Epstein takes us first inside the mind and heart of a girl who longed for love, then into the life of a woman who could never satisfy her ravenous appetite for passion. In the course of his often spellbinding narrative, he presents critical life events other Millay biographers have missed, such as the teenage poet's first erotic experience, with a female friend, and her surprising obsession for horse breeding and racing that eventually drained the considerable fortune she'd earned as one of America's best-known poets.An accomplished poet himself, Epstein also recognizes Millay's genius as a lyricist whose sonnets are considered some of the finest in the language. He illuminates the meaning of some of her most famous poems and the life events that inspired them: the spiritual crisis that resulted in "Renascence," for example, and the tumultuous love affair with a lonely young poet that threatened her marriage and inspired the 52-sonnet sequence, "Fatal Interview."This is a captivating tale, alternately joyous and sad, passionate and desperate, suspenseful and ultimately moving-a must-read for those interested in how life sometimes fools us into thinking that talent, fame, and fortune are synonymous with happiness and peace of mind.