Edna St. Vincent Millay - Camden, Maine - Statues of Historic Figures on Waymarking.com

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Edna St. Vincent Millay - Camden, Maine

in Statues of Historic Figures

Posted by:  T0SHEA

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.

When we arrived in Camden it was overcast and we decided to walk around Harbor Park. In addition of 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 Willis, and unveiled in 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 still remains 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.

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.”
Source: 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: Bartleby