What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay

Amazon.com's Best of 2001
Poet, playwright, and translator Daniel Mark Epstein certainly has the right background to understand and evaluate poet, playwright, and translator Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)--though Millay didn't write biographies. Readers of Epstein's Sister Aimee and Nat King Cole will recognize the intense personal engagement the author brings to his task. He's not afraid to express an almost physical fascination for his subjects, which is especially appropriate for the flamboyant Millay, who insisted on the right to take as many lovers as she pleased and to write about them in some of the greatest erotic poetry in American verse. Epstein focuses on that poetry, deciphering the affairs that fueled it and elucidating the boldly iconoclastic, almost cynical acceptance of love's fleeting nature that informs it. (Of the last sonnet in A Few Figs from Thistles, with its notorious putdown, "I shall forget you presently, my dear / So make the most of this, your little day," he remarks: "For a woman, not yet thirty, to compose and market such a poem... was a scandal, an alarm, and a red flag to censors.") While the Edna St. Vincent Millay who emerges in Nancy Milford's Savage Beauty is indelibly shaped by her upbringing, particularly her relationship with her mother and sisters, Epstein's Millay is a self-created goddess of love and literature. It's fascinating to compare these two biographies, published nearly simultaneously and each with considerable merits. Milford's lengthy book, the product of three decades of research, is lavish with details and comprehensive in scope. Epstein's more selective work excels in cogent summaries and forcefully stated opinions. Either book will satisfy readers with an interest in Millay or American literature; really passionate aficionados of the art of biography will want to read both. --Wendy Smith


From Publishers Weekly
Sexually implacable, perennially noncommittal and, by all accounts, possessed of an irresistible charisma, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay led a love life of Byronic proportions. The truth about her personal affairs was scarcely less fantastic than the rampant speculations; even now, historians find it difficult to separate Millay rumor from Millay fact. This volume, a case in point, is less a biography of the great seductress than an imaginative reconstruction of her amorous adventures. As such, it reads like a literary novel with a racy streak. Some may argue that Epstein goes too far in the fictional coloring of his heroine, particularly in the early parts of the book, where he refers to one of America's greatest lyric poets as "the little sorceress" and "the little actress." Still, Epstein's telling of the poet's progress makes for gripping narrative and will satisfy readers interested in Millay's romantic image and sources of inspiration. An experienced author and poet himself, Epstein is especially skillful at calling up vivid images, and he makes even the better-known facets of Millay's love life (such as her bisexuality and her 25-year open marriage) seem fresh. The book's preface makes much of Epstein's use of unpublished material viewed by hardly anyone besides the poet's sister Norma and "possibly one other biographer whom [Norma] engaged to write a book in the 1970s." In a case of fateful timing, the "other biographer" (Nancy Milford) will at last publish her book, Savage Beauty (Forecasts, June 18), in the same month as Epstein's, and will almost certainly steal his thunder. Whereas Epstein's book offers a rousing tribute to the Millay legend, Milford's outstrips his in breadth and subtlety. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Epstein, a poet as well as a biographer of such disparate figures as Nat King Cole and the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, takes a tightly focused approach by, as he explains, "discussing Millay's love life and how the poetry arose from it." He writes with acuity and grace about the young Millay's determination, yearnings, and intellectual spirituality. By homing in on her erotic life, Epstein runs the risk of belittling Millay's extraordinary literary gifts, "vatic" poetic persona, moral passion, and vibrant and courageous life of the mind. Yet his insights into her adrogony, his understanding of just how ahead of her time she was, his placing her in the pantheon with Shelley, Coleridge, and Baudelaire, and his respect for her marriage to the supportive Eugen Boissevain keep him on solid ground. Certain disclosures, paricularly of Millay's secret racehorse investments, await further study, but Epsteins' keen reading of Millay's poetry and temperament is smart, stirring, and invauluable. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Maxine Kumin
"Epstein's prodigious research has given us an intimate and sympathetic portrait of this unforgettable poet."


Judith Thurman, The New Yorker
"Well researched and briskly narrated."


Donna Seaman, Booklist
"[Epstein] writes with acuity and grace about the young Millay's determination, yearnings, and intellectual spirituality…smart, stirring , and invaluable."


Penelope Mesic, Book Magazine
"Epstein…is a more acute analyst of Millay's verse, and is gifted with sudden, empathic bursts of insight."


X. J. Kennedy, The New Criterion
"In Epstein's history, the lineaments of the plot stand out, clear and compelling."


Review
"Epstein creates a rendering worthy of the poet's energetic life."--People magazine

"Epstein is one of the strongest poets now writing in English. He is also a musician and a scholar; and, as [What Lips My Lips Have Kissed] makes clear, an expert biographer."--Jeffrey Hart, National Review

"Rapturous . . . [Epstein] extols Millay, persuasively, as 'America's foremost love poet.'"--Merle Rubin, The Wall Street Journal



Book Description
A noted biographer and poet illuminates the unique woman who wrote the greatest American love poetry of the twentieth century. This is the story of a rare sort of American genius who grew up in grinding poverty in Camden, Maine. Nothing could save the sensitive child but her talent for words, music, and drama, and an inexorable desire to be loved. When she was twenty, her poetry would make her famous; at thirty she would be adored by readers the world over. Edna St. Vincent Millay was widely considered to be the most seductive woman of her age. Few men could resist her, and many women also fell under her spell. From the publication of her first poems until the scandal over Fatal Interview twenty years later, gossip about the poet's liberated lifestyle prompted speculation about who might be the real subject of her verses. Using letters, diaries, and journals of the poet and her lovers that have only recently become available, Daniel Mark Epstein tells the astonishing story of the life, dedicated to art and love, that inspired the sublime lyrics of Edna St. Vincent Millay.


About the Author
Daniel Mark Epstein is an award-winning essayist, poet, playwright, translator, biographer, and musician. He's won the Prix de Rome, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and been anthologized in several collections of essays and poetry. His books include biographies of Aimee Semple McPherson and Nat King Cole, and seven volumes of poetry. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.


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A passionate paean to the writer Epstein calls "America's foremost love poet." In a terrific volume that supplements rather than supplants Nancy Milford's Savage Beauty (p. 788), Epstein (Nat King Cole, 1999, etc.) presents Millay (1892-1950) as an erotic dynamo whose serial sexual encounters and rich love life inspired her finest poems, which he praises with a lexicon of superlatives. Like Milford (who appears twice as the "other biographer"), Epstein consulted the huge Millay archive (some 20,000 uncatalogued documents) housed at the Library of Congress since the 1986 death of Norma Millay Ellis, sister of the poet and literary executrix. (Milford had examined them years earlier at the Millay home.) Epstein begins on a night in 1911 with a riveting account of the nubile, nightgowned Millay writing in her notebook and chanting by candlelight. He then leaps backward to the story of mother Cora Millay before settling into a chronology from which he does not often deviate. As much as Epstein admires the poems, he can barely restrain his passion for the poet herself. "With her big green eyes and her spectacular floor-length, golden-red hair," he writes of the teenaged Millay, "she looked like a lovely Celtic fairy." Later, he writes eloquently about her breasts, her come-hither look, and that hair, a clipping of which once caused an observer to faint. (He reveals that nude photographs will be available for scholarly inspection in 2010.) Epstein is a phrasemaker, consistently delighting with apposite metaphors and piquant comments on her verse. He chronicles her wild years at Vassar, her cometary appearance in the literary sky with "Renascence" (1912), her arrest supporting Sacco andVanzetti, her Pulitzer, and her enormous popularity. He accuses academic critics-who have often disdained Millay-of doing her "a grave injustice, mistaking clarity and unity for triviality." With great compassion, he charts Millay's sad decline into alcoholism, drug addiction, and depression. A powerful prose-poem whose subject is the language of love-and the poet who sang in no other tongue. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)


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