More on "Edna"

I'm reading Edna St Vincent Millay with great pleasure. While I feel less drawn to some of her later poetry, she is thoroughly admirable. Why had I not investigated her before? There are only two poems in The Penguin Book of American Verse, both rather good. And I love the often-quoted "First Fig":

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

But that was the extent of my knowledge of her, and I had never looked further. I had an image of her in my head from the distance past: an image which I now find was largely mistaken. And I think I've remembered where it came from. In my adolescence I read a novel called, if I remember correctly, The Dragon Variation by (I think) Anthony Glyn. It's a very entertaining novel set in the world of chess. And one of the players has a girlfriend who is fond of the poetry of Edna St Vincent Millay. [I'm thinking back to a book I read more than thirty years ago. I wish I could remember so well what I read last week!]

Glyn's novel, as I remember it, contains a scene in which the chess player, in the middle of having sex with his girlfriend, suddenly has a thought about his adjourned game: he immediately leaps from the bed and, abandoning her in the motel room without even a word, spends hours analysing the game. When I read the book as a nerdish teenager this seemed entirely reasonable behaviour, and the girlfriend's lack of appreciation of it was evidence, perhaps, her shallow character. Looking back now, I see that the scene might for some have a different interpretation. Indeed, the whole book might just have been poking fun at the chess world in a way which, at that age, I totally missed.

So my avoidance of Millay's poetry was a consequence of my adolescent lack of understanding of a (probably rather good) novel that was over my head.

Well, at least I've discovered her now.