An excellent piece from WaPo staff writer Adrian Higgins about efforts to restore Steepletop, the Austerlitz, NY home of the Jazz Age poet Edna St. Vincent Millay--the house, her writing cabin, the pool where she, her husband and friends skinnydipped, and above all her vegetable and fruit gardens:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con....isrc=newsletter



Most of us know "Vincent" as intimates apparently called her from this bit:

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night
But oh! my foes, and oh! my friends,
It gives a lovely light.

But she wrote a substantial body of verse, often inspired by current events, such as the Sacco and Vanzetti trial.

Indeed, my beloved Barbara Michaels was inspired by Millay poems to write two novels: INTO THE DARKNESS, a title taken from "Dirge Without Music"--

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

And BE BURIED IN THE RAIN, from "Justice Denied in Massachusetts":

. . .The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed
uprooted—
We shall not feel it again.
We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.

In the last decade of her life (she died at age 58, in a drunken tumble down the stairs of Steepletop, in 1950) her poetry had fallen out of favor as "oldfashioned", but in its day was considered cutting edge. A lot of it is very much worth the reading still.

If anybody comes looking for me, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.