Renascence (poem)

Last updated

"Renascence" is a 1912 poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, credited with introducing her to the wider world, and often considered one of her finest poems.

Contents

The poem is a 200+ line lyric poem, written in the first person, broadly encompassing the relationship of an individual to humanity and nature. The narrator is contemplating a vista from a mountaintop. Overwhelmed by nature, and thoughts of human suffering, the narrator empathetically feels the deaths of others, and feels pressed into a grave. Friendly rain brings the narrator back to joy in life—the rebirth, or "renascence", of the title.

Publication history and importance to Millay's career

Millay's fame began in 1912 when the nineteen-year-old, encouraged by her mother, entered her poem "Renascence" in a poetry contest in The Lyric Year. [1]

Millay had written and published poetry in St. Nicholas , a children's magazine, throughout her teen years, and had become a proficient poet. [2] At some point, Millay wrote "Renascence" while looking out from the summit of Mt. Battie in Camden, Maine (where a plaque now commemorates the writing of the poem). [3] The poem may have been influenced by Millay's childhood experience of nearly drowning. Her mother, Cora Millay, saw an announcement for a poetry contest sponsored by The Lyric Year , an annual volume of poetry, and encouraged Edna to enter the poem into the contest. [2]

The poem was well received and was published in the annual volume, along with other best entries. [2] On publication, Millay's poem was widely considered the best submission, and her eventual award of fourth place caused a major scandal. [2] The first-place winner Orrick Johns was among those who felt that "Renascence" was the best poem, and stated that "the award was as much an embarrassment to me as a triumph." A second-prize winner offered Millay his $250 prize money. [4]

The scandal brought Millay much attention, and "Renascence" was widely distributed and even taught to schoolchildren as an exemplar of American poetry. [2] Millay used the publication to promote her own career, maintaining correspondence with editors and poets who congratulated her on her publication. [2]

In the immediate aftermath of the Lyric Year controversy, wealthy arts patron Caroline B. Dow heard Millay reciting her poetry and playing the piano at the Whitehall Inn in Camden, Maine, and was so impressed that she offered to pay for Millay’s education at Vassar College. [5]

Notes

  1. "Edna St. Vincent Millay", Poets.org (last visited May 17, 2013).
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Thomas Mallon, "Hustler with a Lyric Voice", Atlantic , Oct. 2001.
  3. "Millay, Edna St. Vincent", Maine: An Encyclopedia.
  4. Dash, Joan (1973). A Life of One’s Own: Three Gifted Women and the Men They Married. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers.
  5. Reuben, Paul P. "Chapter 7: Edna St. Vincent Millay". PAL: Perspectives in American Literature- A Research and Reference Guide. Retrieved July 2, 2012.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edna St. Vincent Millay</span> American poet (1892–1950)

Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American lyrical poet and playwright. Millay was a renowned social figure and noted feminist in New York City during the Roaring Twenties and beyond. She wrote much of her prose and hackwork verse under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Camden, Maine</span> Town in Maine, United States

Camden is a resort town in Knox County, Maine, United States. The population was 5,232 at the 2020 census. The population of the town more than triples during the summer months, due to tourists and summer residents. Camden is a summer colony in the Mid-Coast region of Maine. Similar to Bar Harbor, Nantucket and North Haven, Camden is well known for its summer community of wealthy Northeasterners, mostly from Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Orrick Glenday Johns</span> American poet

Orrick Glenday Johns was an American poet and playwright. He was one of the earliest modernist free-verse poets in Greenwich Village in 1913-1915 and associated with the artist's colony at Grantwood, New Jersey, where Others: A Magazine of the New Verse was founded and published by Alfred Kreymborg in 1915. Johns's work "Olives," a series of fourteen small poems appeared in the first issue of July 1915. He is part of a coterie of poets and authors sometimes called the "Others" group who were contributors to the magazine or residents at the colony and included: William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Ezra Pound, Conrad Aiken, Carl Sandburg, T. S. Eliot, Amy Lowell, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Man Ray, Skipwith Cannell, Lola Ridge, Marcel Duchamp, and Fenton Johnson (poet). Johns is also associated with poets like Vachel Lindsay and Sara Teasdale. and the dramatist Zoe Akins.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Margaret Widdemer</span> American poet and novelist (1884–1978)

Margaret Widdemer was an American poet and novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919 for her collection The Old Road to Paradise, shared with Carl Sandburg for Cornhuskers.

Renascence may refer to:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Mark Epstein</span> American writer

Daniel Mark Epstein is an American poet, dramatist, and biographer. His poetry has been noted for its erotic and spiritual lyricism, as well as its power—in several dramatic monologues—in capturing crucial moments of American history. While he has continued to publish poetry he is more widely known for his biographies of Nat King Cole, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Bob Dylan and Abraham Lincoln, and his radio plays, "Star of Wonder," and "The Two Menorahs," which have become holiday mainstays on National Public Radio.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donald Hall</span> American writer

Donald Andrew Hall Jr. was an American poet, writer, editor, and literary critic. He was the author of over 50 books across several genres from children's literature, biography, memoir, essays, and including 22 volumes of verse. Hall was a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard, and Oxford. Early in his career, he became the first poetry editor of The Paris Review (1953–1961), the quarterly literary journal, and was noted for interviewing poets and other authors on their craft.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louise Bogan</span> American poet

Louise Bogan was an American poet. She was appointed the fourth Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress in 1945, and was the first woman to hold this title. Throughout her life she wrote poetry, fiction, and criticism, and became the regular poetry reviewer for The New Yorker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Oliver</span> American poet (1935–2019)

Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She found inspiration for her work in nature and had a lifelong habit of solitary walks in the wild. Her poetry is characterized by a sincere wonderment and profound connection with the environment, conveyed in unadorned language and simple yet striking imagery. In 2007, she was declared to be the country's best-selling poet.

<i>St. Nicholas</i> (magazine) American childrens magazine

St. Nicholas Magazine was a popular monthly American children's magazine, founded by Scribner's in 1873. The first editor was Mary Mapes Dodge, who continued her association with the magazine until her death in 1905. Dodge published work by the country's leading writers, including Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Mark Twain, Laura E. Richards and Joel Chandler Harris. Many famous writers were first published in St. Nicholas League, a department that offered awards and cash prizes to the best work submitted by its juvenile readers. Edna St. Vincent Millay, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. B. White, and Stephen Vincent Benét were all St. Nicholas League winners.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Dillon (poet)</span> American poet

George Hill Dillon was an American editor and poet. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1932 for The Flowering Stone.

The Poetry Society of America is a literary organization founded in 1910 by poets, editors, and artists. It is the oldest poetry organization in the United States. Past members of the society have included such renowned poets as Witter Bynner, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steepletop</span> Historic house in New York, United States

Steepletop, also known as the Edna St. Vincent Millay House, was the farmhouse home of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and her husband Eugen Jan Boissevain, in Austerlitz, New York, United States. Her former home and gardens are maintained by the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society, a nonprofit organization that also holds the rights to the poet's intellectual property. Steepletop was declared a National Historic Landmark on November 11, 1971.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur Davison Ficke</span> American writer and poet (1883–1945)

Arthur Davison Ficke was an American poet, playwright, and expert of Japanese art. Ficke had a national reputation as "a poet's poet", and "one of America's most expert sonneteers". Under the alias Anne Knish, Ficke co-authored Spectra (1916). Intended as a spoof of the experimental verse which was fashionable at the time, the collection of strange poems unexpectedly caused a sensation among modernist critics which eclipsed Ficke's recognition as a traditional prose stylist. Ficke is also known for his relationship with poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.

A bibliography of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ragged Island (Harpswell, Maine)</span>

Ragged Island is a privately owned island in Harpswell, Maine, United States, in Cumberland County, which is geographically within Casco Bay in the Gulf of Maine. It is located at 43°43′39″N69°56′13″W.

"I, being born a woman and distressed" is a poem by American author Edna St. Vincent Millay. The poem appeared in Millay's 1923 collection The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems. The first-person speaker of the fourteen-line, Italian sonnet addresses a potential lover. She confesses to an intense physical attraction but denies the possibility of any emotional or intellectual connection.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean Starr Untermeyer</span> American poet

Jean Starr Untermeyer was an American poet, translator, and educator. She was the author of six volumes of poetry and a memoir. She was married to the poet Louis Untermeyer from 1906 to 1926.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Norma Millay</span> American actress (1894–1986)

Norma Millay was an American singer and actress, and sister of the poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay. Born in Rockland, Maine to Cora Lounella Buzelle and Henry Tolman Millay, Norma Millay was one of three sisters who were all, due to their parents’ divorce, brought up by their mother. Having been a writer of poetry herself, Cora Millay ensured the presence of art and music in the Millay household, which became a vital part of the upbringing of the three sisters. Norma Millay would go on to perform with the Provincetown Players and appear on Broadway. She married painter and actor Charles Ellis, but did not use his surname.

Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat nor Drink is a 1931 poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, written during the Great Depression.