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 Edna St. Vincent Millay - Camden, Maine Posted by:  T0SHEA
N 44° 12.676 W 069° 03.809
19T E 494928 N 4895340
This statue of Edna St. Vincent Millay is in Harbor Park that overlooks Camden and the islands in Penobscot Bay. It is believed this was the location that inspired her poem: Renascence.
Waymark Code: WMQ891
Location: Maine, United States
Date Posted: 01/07/2016
Views: 1
When we arrived in Camden it was overcast and we decided to walk around Harbor Park. In addition to several dedicated benches, we found this wonderful statue of Edna St. Vincent Millay who won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for The Ballad Of The Harp-Weaver in 1923.
The statue was sculpted by Robert Grant Willis, and dedicated on August 15, 1989.
Renascence, her first volume of poetry, appeared in 1917. She was one of the most popular poets of her era and Renascence was praised for its freshness and vitality. She coined the popular phrase, "My candle burns at both ends."
She was born February 22, 1892 in Rockland, Maine. After her parents divorced in 1900, Millay moved with her sisters and mother to Camden, Maine where you can visit her statue.
Edna St. Vincent Millay died on October 19, 1950, at the age of 58, in Albany, New York. There remains in Camden the white clapboard house that was Millay’s country home for twenty-five years. It remains as she left it upon her death and she is interred on the property.
Below is an excerpt from the sculpture's page at the Smithsonian, which tells us how the sculpture came to be.
Description:
Depiction of Edna St. Vincent Millay standing with both her arms behind her back holding a book of poetry. Her head is turned toward the proper left side and her hair is pulled back in a bun.
Remarks:
Virginia artist and Camden summer resident, artist Robert Willis noted that Camden did not have a monument to its town's most famous daughter, Edna St. Vincent Millay, distinguished poet and the first woman Pulitzer Prize winner. A non-profit organization was formed to handle fundraising efforts. The sculpture estimated to cost $25,000. Willis depicts Millay as she might have looked at nineteen, when she published "Renascence", one of her earliest and most famous poems. IAS files contain copy of dedication booklet; newspaper clippings from Kennebec Journal, Oct. 18, 1988, pg. 6; and Bangor Daily News (Sept. 1, 1991); and other unidentified newsclippings which give summary of Millay's life.
From the Smithsonian
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Throughout much of her career, Pulitzer Prize-winner Edna St. Vincent Millay was one of the most successful and respected poets in America. She is noted for both her dramatic works, including Aria da capo, The Lamp and the Bell, and the libretto composed for an opera, The King’s Henchman, and for such lyric verses as “Renascence” and the poems found in the collections A Few Figs From Thistles, Second April, and The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.
Like her contemporary Robert Frost, Millay was one of the most skillful writers of sonnets in the twentieth century, and also like Frost, she was able to combine modernist attitudes with traditional forms creating a unique American poetry.
But Millay’s popularity as a poet had at least as much to do with her person: she was known for her riveting readings and performances, her progressive political stances, frank portrayal of both hetero and homosexuality, and, above all, her embodiment and description of new kinds of female experience and expression. “Edna St. Vincent Millay,” notes her biographer Nancy Milford, “became the herald of the New Woman.”
From the Poetry Foundation
Renascence
ALL I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked the other way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I’d started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.
Over these things I could not see:
These were the things that bounded me;
And I could touch them with my hand,
Almost, I thought, from where I stand.
Read Renascence in its entirety at Bartleby
TITLE: Edna St. Vincent Millay
ARTIST(S): Robert Willis
DATE: August 15, 1989
MEDIUM: Sculpture: bronze; Base: rock
CONTROL NUMBER: IAS ME000017
Direct Link to the Individual Listing in the Smithsonian Art Inventory: [Web Link]
PHYSICAL LOCATION:
Harbor Park
Atlantic Avenue
DIFFERENCES NOTED BETWEEN THE INVENTORY LISTING AND YOUR OBSERVATIONS AND RESEARCH:
None noted. It still appears to be well maintained and in quite good condition.
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Visit Instructions:
Please give the date of your visit, your impressions of the sculpture, and at least ONE ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPH. Add any additional information you may have, particularly any personal observations about the condition of the sculpture.
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