Status Updates From Letters of Edna St. Vincent...

she stuffed her sister’s mouth with leaves and genuinely tried to kill her when they were young and claims to have stopped only because “i knew you would become a very amusing person, and thus deserved to live” 😭😭

I too hate this pink-and-gray college! So real!

“I am hoping that college will help me;—but if I should come back a suffragette instead of a poet wouldn’t it be dreadful?”

Hehehehe

Manuel Maria Mischoulon's translated 24 Sonetos Magistrales de la Lengua Inglesa looks to be hard to come by.

Millay writes to "Ellery Queen" about repub of her story "Murder in the Fishing Cat."

Millay splurged on a Walt Kuhn clown painting.

I'm really coming away with the impression that Ficke was an ass -- and this is based on the POV of someone who loved him!

Millay translation of Baudelaire! Must get!

In 1927, Millay was arrested for "sauntering and loitering" along with Dos Passos, Jack Lawson, and three others.

Millay rejected honors from the League of American Penwomen because they had dissed Elinor Wylie's personal life.

How did you guess that a lacquer serpent with a ruby eye was just what I had written Father Christmas to bring me? I didn't have a single lacquer serpent to my name, Bunny, let alone one with a ruby eye.

I have one of those. It holds up my Rilke books.

I can't find F.P.A.'s "Beside the street of Grove" online. Too bad; if Millay liked it must (surely) be better than his usual line.

Edmund Wilson apparently thought Millay was like Manon Lescaut (as a person, not re: her writing).

Millay was friends with Edmund Wilson. She calls him "Bunny"(!)

"The Pig who walks by Himself" snorf.

Arthur Ficke on Millay's "Renascence": "The little item about her in the back of the book [The Lyric Year] is a marvel of humor. No sweet young thing of twenty ever ended a poem precisely where this one ends: it takes a brawny male of forty-five to do that."

Books Millay liked at age 18

"A person who publishes a book wilfully appears before the population with his pants down. And there's nothing you can do about that." (From letter to Cora Millay - mother - 1927)

"And then, too, it is as if I knew of a swamp of violets, & wanted to take you there, & share them with you, because you are my friend. --But all that is the least of it, my dear.--And you must never think that I don't understand.--

You will never grow old to me, or die, or be lost in any way." (From letter to Ficke, 1920)

"When are you two boys coming back here? Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the day-time, and falling into at night. I miss you like hell." (From letter to Witter Bynner, 1920)

"I have learned to glare with a hunted expression all about me at a corner, to elbow fiercely on occasion those fellow creatures whom I love as myself, and to run and grab, - literally GRAB a street-car! I have been here since Wednesday and I am become a hardened citizen of a heartless metropolis." (On NY, while attending Vassar, from letter to Ficke, 1913 - age 21)

"As to the line you speak of - 'Did you get it from a book?' indeed! I'll slap your face." (From letter to Arthur Davison Ficke, 1912) - From now on, my work emails will include threats to slap one's face.