I really love that photo, too.

I don’t have much to add except an enthusiastic thumbs up!

But I do know that “Renascence” is very early, written when Millay was herself a teen, and I’ve never really cared for it, partly because it’s very sing-song-y, like she’s channeling lesser Poe, and partly because it’s exactly what her (later) sonnets are not: wild breast-beating, adolescent keening. With lots! of exclamation! points! It’s not altogether bad, but it doesn’t have the fine-ness and control and depth that her later work has. It’s all on the surface.

But then I never really liked Keats, either. Another adolescent certain that he’s the only one who ever experienced deep feeling…

[blah blah some stuff about Keats and Apollo] “who then dies into immortal life with a scream: that is revisionist mythmaking. (The same scream, by the way, tears through the young throat of Edna St. Vincent Millay, in a poem many women loved as girls and later learned to despise; “Renascence,” too, is a poem about the genesis of a poet.)”

So, I looked up the poem–had never read any of her stuff before–and I was like, Wait, why would girls love this and then learn to hate it when they got old? Am I missing something?

I mean, it’s embarrassingly difficult for me to read poems that were written after the 17th century. So I could be missing something. But I can’t figure it out. Can anyone clarify this for me?

Millay’s selected works is the only poetry book I own. Most poets I cannot understand or relate to at all, but Millay’s poems have always resonated with me.