Works
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
from A Few Figs from Thistles (1920)
Millay wrote five verse dramas early in her career, including Two Slatterns and a King and The Lamp and the Bell, a poem written for Vassar College about love between women. She was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera House to write a libretto for an opera composed by Deems Taylor. The result, The King's Henchman, drew on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's account of Eadgar, King of Wessex, and was described as the most effectively and artistically wrought American opera ever to reach the stage. Within three weeks, her publishers had run through four editions of the book.
Her pacifist verse drama Aria da Capo, a one-act play written for the Provincetown Players, is often anthologized. It aired live as an episode of Academy Theatre in 1949 on NBC.
"Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare" (1922) is an homage to the Geometry of Euclid. "Renascence" and "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver" are often considered her finest poems. On her death, The New York Times described her as "an idol of the younger generation during the glorious early days of Greenwich Village One of the greatest American poets of her time." Thomas Hardy said that America had two great attractions: the skyscraper and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Read more about this topic: Edna St. Vincent Millay
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep.”
—Bible: Hebrew Psalms 107:23-24.
“Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist.... In relation to the inclusiveness and literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)
“When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well spare,—muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works that belong to these. But the central wisdom, which was old in infancy, is young in fourscore years, and dropping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)