The siren

At the same time, her poetry attracted a following stirred by her simple, spirited verse and its intimations of a glamorously modern sensual freedom. "She gave the Jazz Age its lyric voice," Milford writes, and even though most of us don't realize it, we still use an expression she invented to describe a life of impudent abandon:

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!

In Greenwich Village, Millay's candle lasted a bit longer than one night, but living up to her reputation proved draining and she fled her hopelessly tempestuous personal life for Europe in 1921. In a matter of weeks, she'd generated a similar mess in Paris and managed to drag it from Austria and Italy to remotest Albania and back. By the time she returned to America in 1923, she was exhausted and ill and had utterly failed in her efforts to write a novel. She then made one of the smartest decisions in a life that, for all its seeming recklessness, was characterized by a keen instinct for self-preservation: she married a wealthy Dutch importer named Eugen Boissevain.

Boissevain doted on Millay, nursed her back to health and whisked her out of the city to a farm in the Berkshires they named Steepletop. She would live there, tended lovingly by her husband, for the rest of her life, becoming even more famous and successful writing plays as well as poetry. She took up the anti-Fascist cause and early on urged U.S. intervention in World War II, writing verse that propagandized against Hitler and thereby producing what even she considered the weakest writing of her career. By the time she went back to the more intimate subjects that were her forte, it was too late to redeem her critical reputation. Ravaged by lifelong alcoholism and a more recently acquired morphine addiction, her health declined. Eugen died suddenly of lung cancer in 1949, and after an admirable attempt to rally her powers, Millay broke her neck when she fell down the staircase at Steepletop just over a year later.

The drawback of being so quintessentially of one's time, as the novelist Jay McInerney can no doubt testify, comes when that time has passed. Although Millay's late poetry was, if anything, even better than the work of her youth, she'd been brushed aside. "The fact that the direction of her progress has been from legend to success," wrote the critic Rolfe Humphries in the early '40s, "somewhat confuses discussion of her merit as an artist. If she is not taken quite seriously in this role today, it may be that she was taken too seriously twenty years ago ... placing her out of her class, over her head, instead of keeping her where she really belonged ... as Elizabeth Barrett Browning's naughty younger sister in the parlor, the last of the female Victorians." Ouch.

It doesn't seem to have occurred to Humphries that if the initial embrace of Millay as "the greatest female poet since Sappho" might have been too fervent, then perhaps her later rejection was too punitive. Strangely, neither of these two biographies tries very convincingly to resurrect Millay's rep -- at least not if that means explicitly confronting the modernist aesthetic standards that damned her as, in the words of Kenneth Tynan (an admirer, who was characterizing a view he disagreed with) "a pretty non-combatant, a delicate fashioner of pathetic parlor verse."

Her poetry was, indeed, sentimental and obvious if you compare it to cerebral, allusive, blank verse about the despair of hollow men or austere images attesting to the importance of red wheelbarrows -- but then so is Keats'. And the body of her work is uneven, but then so is Byron's. The days when poetry needed to prove a strenuous unfamiliarity with parlors are long gone, and there's something craven about any blanket repudiation of Millay's work, as if the repudiators are afraid that T.S. Eliot or some equally fastidious literary authority might come along and rap then on their knuckles with a ruler. There are fine poems to be found in these biographies (and in a new volume of Millay's poems just out from Modern Library -- though this unfortunately lacks her late, more complex work), if we're not too cowed to give them a chance.

Approaching Millay's life appears to be just as tricky as evaluating her poetry. Like Epstein, you can simply swallow hook, line and sinker the romantic legend of an irresistible goddess of both love and poetry, a woman who was "our most illustrious love poet" with a "megawatt libido" and a "powerhouse career" and whose beauty, according to Epstein, was blinding when she "took her clothes off and stood naked before a man for the first time." That's the route Epstein opts for, and his biography -- written in the two years since he discovered a cache of Millay family papers in the Library of Congress -- is probably closer to the blend of gushing adulation and tabloid leer that most of the readers picking up Milford's more high-profile book will secretly be hoping for. Epstein clearly worked himself up into quite a state writing it: his enthusings range from insisting that "there can be no more precise account of the psychic burden of the poet, the moral poet, or the anointed saint" than Millay's precocious "Renascence" to describing her college dorm as "a harem of sex-starved Vassar girls eager for same-sex experiments."

Next Page: The real revelation: Millay's extraordinary husband

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