Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay

Dramatist Epstein (The Loyal Son) assembles in this intimate collection the first publication of the diaries of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950). The entries, which cover 1907–1949, offer moving insights into the interior and domestic life of the Pulitzer winner. She wrote her breakthrough poem “Renascence” in 1912, and the diaries capture her reaction to the poem’s success (“Read it and get a life-long swell-head!” she writes about one review), as well as her life at Steepletop, her upstate New York farm, with her husband. Many of the entries are just one line long, but others offer rambling considerations: “Why on earth, pray tell, should I have dreamed last night of velvet... never before, it seems to me, did I dream of velvet.” Epstein’s excellent and concise introductions to the various eras of his subject’s life highlight that though Millay’s diaries coincide with her most mentally stable periods, they also offer a glimpse of a woman addicted to medical morphine and mired in alcoholism: “They are lovely here & give me all the morphine I want—ply me with morphine,” she wrote in 1927 while at Mount Sinai Hospital after an operation. Through it all, Millay comes across as full of life: energetic, intelligent, and vivacious. These entries are a pleasure to read. (Mar.)