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Thumbnail History: In her lifetime Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was renowned for her traditional poetic and her bohemian living. She infused conventional forms with a fervent contemporary spirit. The publication in 1912 of the poem "Renascence," written when she was 19, won her instant acclaim. A reading of it attracted a patron (Caroline Dow) who sent Millay to Vassar College in New York. Millay was both a critically acclaimed and extremely popular poet. In later life, she switched from writing lyrical sonnets about personal topics to writing political and social poems. Early in her career Millay wrote fiction under the pseudonym of Nancy Boyd; later she wrote several plays and an opera libretto. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and in the 1930s she published sonnets that have earned a lasting place as exemplars of the form. In later years she applied her art to the Allied war effort and other social causes. Edmund Wilson deemed Millay "a spokesman for the human spirit"; few writers have commanded so wide and enduring an audience. From 1923 to her death, Millay lived with her husband in Austerlitz, New York, at their farmhouse at Steepletop, now a National Historic Landmark. In 1973 her sister, Norma Millay, established The Millay Colony for the Arts which affords writers, composers, and visual artists the chance to further their work in surroundings already rich with an artistic heritage. ... The preceeding information was researched by Lawrence Warner.
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