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A review by margaret_j_c
Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford
This is everything that a biography should be. Tragic and lovely and positively perverse in places, like Vincent herself. I do not like the majority of Millay's poetry, almost to the point of "can't stand it," and I picked this brick up anyway. Gents, Nancy Milford knows how to dress a book.
A good biographer is always a little in love with their subject. Milford gives Vincent the kind of rapt attention that she probably would have wanted, and consequently Savage Beauty is a thing of wonder. The story of Edna St. Vincent Millay is as fascinating as any novel I've read, and among that distinct class of books that actually makes one want to write when one reads it. I have been a conscious writer of bad poetry for years and I'm sure that tendency won't disappear anytime soon, but this biography makes it clear that a poet - a real, true, set-apart poet - is quite a different thing from someone who takes up verse as a hobby. There can be no doubt that Edna worked for poetry, and suffered for it, and as a reward for her pain it remained with her, her sole companion in death. Edna died the way that she lived - heedlessly, violently, wholeheartedly. Through her the acts of living and dying became poems within themselves, wrought with a savage beauty.
I will control myself, or go inside.
I will not flaw perfection with my grief.
Handsome, this day: no matter who has died.
A good biographer is always a little in love with their subject. Milford gives Vincent the kind of rapt attention that she probably would have wanted, and consequently Savage Beauty is a thing of wonder. The story of Edna St. Vincent Millay is as fascinating as any novel I've read, and among that distinct class of books that actually makes one want to write when one reads it. I have been a conscious writer of bad poetry for years and I'm sure that tendency won't disappear anytime soon, but this biography makes it clear that a poet - a real, true, set-apart poet - is quite a different thing from someone who takes up verse as a hobby. There can be no doubt that Edna worked for poetry, and suffered for it, and as a reward for her pain it remained with her, her sole companion in death. Edna died the way that she lived - heedlessly, violently, wholeheartedly. Through her the acts of living and dying became poems within themselves, wrought with a savage beauty.
I will control myself, or go inside.
I will not flaw perfection with my grief.
Handsome, this day: no matter who has died.