Collected Poems

Wonderful poet who carried on the legacy of the earlier Transcendentalists as she sipped from the same streams of ecstasy and enlightenment. Her collected works is worth having in hardbound. Seller was great.

If you like poetry - and especially the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay - "Collected Poems" is for you. Photos of Millay from childhood in Maine to life as a young poet in Manhattan. As an indispensable companion volume, I recommend Nancy Milford's "Savage Beauty" - an exhaustive look at Vincent's life, loves, lovers, poems - and vastly more. These two books will become part of your intellectual vault. They will haunt you.

Millay has been criticized for her lack of technical rigor, but that is the very essence of her accessibility to readers. Yes, she wrote poems that rhymed, sometimes to the point of sing-song meter, but her words carried weight. They meant (and still mean) something, not like the esoteric, pseudo-intellectual hodge-podge that passes for modern poetry. It seems that today's poets wear their inaccessibility as a badge of honor - that only a select group of academic word-smiths can even understand what they have written seems to represent success for them. Not so with Edna. She touches your heart, sometimes even breaks it, with common words, feelings, emotions. You don't have to work for her meaning, it is plainly presented for all to read. But beware! Her poems may be easy to understand, but they are impossible to forget.

This is a comprehensive collection, essentially a reprint of the 1980s edition with some welcome extra info added. The layout is the same, and I think it is good: the large text and double-spacing, while occasionally leading to some annoying fragmenting of longer lines, provides an authoritative space for each poem, and this encourages an attentive contemplation of each piece in its own right. And they are well worth that attention - the early stuff can be a bit twee, but the later poems like "Beautiful Parsi Woman" and "Dirge Without Music", and the many beautiful sonnets, which comprise most of the second half of the book, more than make up for it. For sheer grace, I would set some of these against any poetry written in the twentieth century. Millay has a perfect ear for the sounds of words and the way they lie together. She also has plenty of passion and a delicious, strong, sly sense of humour. Most of the pieces are about love, beauty, death, or all three, and the remarkable way the prosaic can intertwine with the transcendent. I would have loved to have spent an afternoon with Edna St Vincent Millay and Colette: both seem to have the same appetite for beauty and bring same pleasant irony to emotional experience.It's the kind of book you can either dip into or get lost in, depending on the time available and the mood you're in. I prefer its comprehensiveness and its layout to the other collections of Millay I have seen, barring the 1980s edition of which this is a rerun. If you can get hold of a copy of that, do so, for while this is an adequate reading copy, the print(-on-demand?) job is pretty awful when it comes to the cover. I bought two copies as gifts; both had bad smudging on the cover and one arrived torn and creased. This was disappointing and is the reason for 4 rather than 5 stars.

I have had this wondrous collection since 1959. It (the book I have and the dust jacket crumbling thereon) looks it!!! I wanted a replacement, whereas I keep the original with its notes; and I can quote many of the sonnets by heart.I am sad that it sold for so little. I hope that changes.The pages were all clean, but I was disappointed that, while the photo of the book shown by Amazon has a dust cover, and the seller did not specify that there was none, nevertheless I now have two hard covers and the original very ragged dust cover from 1959 (which I've photocopied) instead of a fresher dust jacket.Because the photo of Millay on the back does not show her beauty, Milford's descriptions of her (AND her sexual adventures), I thought from age 20 that she was like me!!!!I very much appreciate the extensive photo pages - I have just learned from another bio that there are other (nude) photos of Millay embargoed until 2010 - does anyone know of their whereabouts in 2013?Why Hollywood or HBO has not yet covered this Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, playwright, Broadway actress and interesting woman is a conundrum. On verra~~~

One of a number of the best .

Edna St.. Vincent Millay was a turn of the century poet who did most of her best work in the mid-to-late 1920's and was quite the romantic in spirit and in through her poetry. Fond of her garden and all the varieties of flowers growing therein she focused on life and death of all living things. Unfortunately, for those of us who become easily depressed, she also focuses on the "autumn" years, elegies to dead friends, and poems of lost loves. But then that's the "romantic" (Rousseauian) part of her soul.Beautifully done in many forms of meter, perhaps her best work, about 96 sonnets, are at the book's end, and allow for one to delve at will into the thoughts of a very loving and sensitive lady. I wish she were still here today. Not the same as our Maya Angelou, but of a different era, and just as clever with words and meanings as Maya. A good read, if a bit long in its collection/compendium of all of her works

I have had the paper edition of this anthology for many, many years. We are moving and downsizing, so I got the Kindle edition and am giving the paper book to a dear friend, whose copy of it was lost under tragic circumstances along with many of her other possessions. I am actually happy to have it on Kindle, so that I can carry it with me wherever I go (the paper version is quite heavy). Reading a Millay poem or two while waiting for the doctor or the hairdresser or the optometrist is a great pleasure indeed!

En general, algo que tienen los libros comerciales de EUA es que la impresión o acabados dejan un poco que desear. El pegado es algo incómodo (sobre todo en las primeras y las últimas páginas, por lo delgado del papel interior), y me parece que la cubierta está un poco chueca (no sé si el corte o la impresión), porque el diseño se inclina un poquito.Lo compré para un regalo y aunque el contenido está muy bien, decidí cambiarlo por otra cosa más, porque además llegó maltratado de la cubierta.Por otra parte, en esta obra se aproximan “como un plus” a su biografía y cartas, pero dejan a un lado la intensa vida poliamorosa de la autora y su pensamiento reaccionario, por lo cual a estas alturas su intento resulta un tanto curioso y superficial.

O livro veio com uma dobra, por erro na encadernação. Para desfazê-la, terei de rasgar a página, com danos irreparáveis. Além disso, a impressão da fotos é de péssima qualidade.

I very much enjoy dipping into this collection, would recommend.

Received promptly. She is Edna, so what more is there to say?

…to read, to wallow in, to wade through, to wander amidst, to enjoy for no other reasonthan to revere the desires, despair, dreams of one clever enough to be published AND loved. :-)