Love, though for this you riddle me with dartsTweetPosted by Kit Frick on September 28, 2010

Just finished Daniel Mark Epstein’s biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Henry Holt, 2001). If you read one biography of a poet this year, make it this one! Epstein had access to diaries, journals, and letters housed in the Library of Congress and previously read by only 3 others, and he has turned this sizable hodge-podge of correspondence and reflections into a truly engrossing, powerful biography. To his advantage, Epstein was granted a rich array of sources from which to draw: Millay’s epistolary correspondence and, to a lesser degree, journal-keeping, was voluminous, and her life as brimming with scandal, success, and tragedy as any biographer could hope. Millay led the life we want to imagine all poets—especially those writing during the peak of bohemia in Greenwich Village—must lead: her biography provides a thrilling and voyeuristic window into her poetry, and we are all the richer for it. To Epstein’s immense credit, he presents Millay’s life through a biographer’s lens that allows the ecstasies in the poet’s life to soar to the heights of desire, passion, and artistic triumph that they were; delves into her low times without fear of denting his subject’s goddess-like pedestal; conjectures at motive without over-stepping the bounds of his sources; and throughout, weaves a mighty good yarn.

Suggested accompanying reading: Collected Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay (HarperPerennial, 1988).

Suggested accompanying / competing reading: Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Random House, 2001) by Nancy Milford. (Has anyone read it? Both? Thoughts on either biography, or the two in conversation?)