Tag Archives: Poets

A Year in Books/Day 83: Savage Beauty

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  • Title: Savage Beauty The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay
  • Author: Nancy Milford
  • Year Published: 2001 (Random House)
  • Year Purchased: 2002-2004
  • Source: Barnes & Noble
  • About: This distinguished biography of the Maine-born poet is one hell of an intense, engaging read. It’s well-researched and superbly written, pulling you with ease and throbbing immediacy into the bohemian haunts of the Greenwich Village and Paris of the early twentieth century. Thanks to Milford’s contact with the poet’s younger sister, Norma, she was able to access Millay’s personal archives. It is at once nuanced and immense, revelatory and re-affirmative; the result is one of my favourite literary biographies.
  • Motivation: Edna. St. Vincent. Millay. Seriously, her talent, intellect and life were breathtaking and bewitching. I also may or may not bear a striking physical resemblance to the red-haired poet. Really, I should write a one-woman show based on her life and cast myself in the role. Hmmm. Maybe I should start practicing that Down East accent.
  • Times Read: Countless
  • Random Excerpt/Page 78: “That was a remarkable note of affection, and it would not be the last time Edna St. Vincent Millay would win to her side an older woman who was in a position to help her. They were taken with Edna Millay. They wanted to assist her in any way they could, perhaps because in the careful structure of their lives they felt diminished. Her life would be grand, sweeping, urgent. Incapable of this themselves, they would help her.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10
    Photograph of Edna St. Vincent Millay

    Photograph of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

     

A Year in Books/Day 61: English Romantic Poetry

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  • Title: English Romantic Poetry An Anthology
  • Editor: Stanley Appelbaum
  • Year Published: 1996 (Dover Thrift Editions)
  • Year Purchased: 1999/2000
  • Source: A gift from a friend.
  • About: When you hear the term “English Romantic Poets”, who initially comes to mind? If you say anyone other than William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley or John Keats….then you are lying. This anthology contains scores of poems by the aforementioned wordsmiths.
  • Motivation: My friend was cleaning out her shelves and I emerged precisely a dozen volumes richer. While this period of poetry is not my favourite, I do have a soft spot for Coleridge and find much to admire of everyone on the list.
  • Times Read: A few
  • Random Excerpt/Page x: “For many, Shelley remains the perfect Romantic: for his quest after truth and justice, for his unparalleled learning (Greco-Roman and otherwise) and breadth of scope (poems on love, politics, history and philosophy), for the dazzling variety and novelty of his meters and stanzas, for the exquisiteness of his diction and delicacy of his thought.”
  • Happiness Scale: 7

    Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1795, by Peter Vandyke

    Image via Wikipedia