Dan's review
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Collected Lyrics by Edna St. Vincent Millay
I pursued Edna St. Vincent Millay after reading John McWhorter's "Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music." He cited her as the poet of careful craft, an exemplary poet of pre-beat twentieth century America. And indeed, his promotion did not let me down. There were many poems I didn't care for in the volume, some too loose, some too political. The good ones were amazing, though, very carefully constructed, conscious of meter and rhyme. Many meditations on life, love, death, the mountains, and the sea that I would like to memorize. It's refreshing to read formal poetry, to escape rampant free verse for a while.
