How Losing a Poetry Competition Launched Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Career

By Nava Atlas | On April 27, 2025 | Updated April 28, 2025 | Comments (0)

Edna St. Vincent Millay was just nineteen when she began to compose “Renascence” some time toward the end of 1911. Written at a time of uncertainty about her future, it was a poem about herself, yet it dealt with the common human struggle to find hope when everything seems hopeless.

She had been an outstanding student in her tiny Maine high school, and a star contributor to the popular children’s publication St. Nicholas Magazine. Once she had passed the age limit (eighteen) for submissions, she was left without an outlet for her poetry.

Fighting despair, she grasped that no one could save her but herself. “I must exert every atom of my will and lift myself body and soul — above my situation and my surroundings …”

Fortuitously, Vincent’s mother Cora, a traveling nurse, spotted an issue of Poetry, A Magazine of Verse in a wastebasket near the bed of a sleeping patient. Rescuing it from the trash, she saw an announcement that new poetry was being collection to be titled The Lyric Year. The magazine was sponsoring a contest with three cash prizes — a grand prize of $500, and $250 for the second and third-place winners.

What a difference $500 would make to the family! In today’s money, that equaled about $15,000. Equally important, if Vincent’s poetry was selected, the exposure would be priceless. Cora pleaded with her daughter, who was distracted by her first situationship with a young woman, to buckle down and finish the new poem. Working diligently over several weeks, it ended up at a whopping 214 lines. Vincent titled the poem “Renascence.” It began:

All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.

The first few lines sound simple, but as the poem builds, it grows darker and more complex. On a mountaintop modeled on Vincent’s beloved Mount Battie (where the poem is now inscribed on a plaque at the spot that inspired it) the narrator is awed by nature. He or she (it’s never specified) suffers, experiences death, and is buried. After a refreshing rain, the narrator is reborn and is once again able to experience great joy.

Who is this mystery poet?

While sifting through more than ten thousand mostly mediocre poems, Mr. Earle, the Lyric Year contest’s director, was so moved by “Renascence” that he fired off a letter to “E. St. Vincent Millay, Esquire.” “Dear Sir,” it began, for Mr. Earle believed that such a poem could only have come from the pen of a middle-aged man who had seen much of life.

He informed the poet that “Renascence” was accepted for publication. He then added something he shouldn’t have — that he believed it would win the top cash prize. What he didn’t say was that it wasn’t only his decision to make. And in the end, Mr. Earle was outvoted. “Renascence” came in fourth — no award, no cash prize. Vincent was crushed, but what made it worse was that she’d never heard her mother cry so hard.

The first-prize winner was embarrassed by his award. The second and third-prize winners discussed giving Vincent their prize money (though they never did). If anything in the literary world could counted as a scandal, this certainly qualified.

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A famous portrait of Vincent taken during her time at Vassar College
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Winning fame and a college scholarship by losing

And, as it turns out, she won by losing the contest. The hoopla over the loss made her famous overnight — at least, in the literary world and among devoted poetry readers. Everyone believed that “E. Vincent Millay” had been robbed of the honor as well as the prize money. Gradually, it was revealed the creator of this mature, majestic poem, was a young woman not quite out of her teens.

Suddenly, literary magazines offered to publish her work. Now, well-known poets and other writers wrote to her with admiration for “Renascence.” Her replies to her new admirers were so charming that lifelong friendships (some of which later even became romances) were forged.

That summer, Vincent lucked into the opportunity to recite her new poem at the Whitehall Inn, an elegant hotel favored by wealthy visitors to the Maine coast. In her resonant voice, she recited “Renascence” by heart to the rapt audience. Vincent enjoyed the attention immensely. But even better, because of her performances that night, she’d caught the attention of two of the guests who would soon be offering her full scholarships to Vassar and Smith, two prestigious girls’ colleges.

She chose Vassar, mainly due to its easy access to New York City. Twenty-year-old Vincent arrived in New York City already a rising star in the literary world. She was invited to teas with well-known poets and given a reception by famous writers and editors in the city. She was getting paid for poems that were published in magazines. Still, becoming an official adult made her wistful. The day before her twenty-first birthday, she wrote: “Shall be grown-up tomorrow, oh, dear! I loved being twenty. Goodbye to this beautiful year. I somehow feel that twenty-one will be different.” And she was right.

There is lots more to Edna St. Vincent’s life story, but it can’t all be told here. She didn’t live a long life, and it was never uncomplicated but she did live.

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Edna St. Vincent Millay and Eugen Jan Boissevain married in 1923. She and the kindhearted Dutch businessman had a warm, wonderful open marriage.

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Renascence by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1912)

All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another 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.
And all at once things seemed so small
My breath came short, and scarce at all.
But, sure, the sky is big, I said;
Miles and miles above my head;
So here upon my back I’ll lie
And look my fill into the sky.
And so I looked, and, after all,
The sky was not so very tall.
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,
And—sure enough!—I see the top!
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I ‘most could touch it with my hand!
And reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.
I screamed, and—lo!—Infinity
Came down and settled over me;
Forced back my scream into my chest,
Bent back my arm upon my breast,
And, pressing of the Undefined
The definition on my mind,
Held up before my eyes a glass
Through which my shrinking sight did pass
Until it seemed I must behold
Immensity made manifold;
Whispered to me a word whose sound
Deafened the air for worlds around,
And brought unmuffled to my ears
The gossiping of friendly spheres,
The creaking of the tented sky,
The ticking of Eternity.
I saw and heard, and knew at last
The How and Why of all things, past,
And present, and forevermore.
The Universe, cleft to the core,
Lay open to my probing sense
That, sick’ning, I would fain pluck thence
But could not,—nay! But needs must suck
At the great wound, and could not pluck
My lips away till I had drawn
All venom out.—Ah, fearful pawn!
For my omniscience paid I toll
In infinite remorse of soul.
All sin was of my sinning, all
Atoning mine, and mine the gall
Of all regret. Mine was the weight
Of every brooded wrong, the hate
That stood behind each envious thrust,
Mine every greed, mine every lust.
And all the while for every grief,
Each suffering, I craved relief
With individual desire,—
Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire
About a thousand people crawl;
Perished with each,—then mourned for all!
No hurt I did not feel, no death
That was not mine; mine each last breath
That, crying, met an answering cry
From the compassion that was I.
All suffering mine, and mine its rod;
Mine, pity like the pity of God.
Ah, awful weight! Infinity
Pressed down upon the finite Me!
My anguished spirit, like a bird,
Beating against my lips I heard;
Yet lay the weight so close about
There was no room for it without.
And so beneath the weight lay I
And suffered death, but could not die.
Long had I lain thus, craving death,
When quietly the earth beneath
Gave way, and inch by inch, so great
At last had grown the crushing weight,
Into the earth I sank till I
Full six feet under ground did lie,
And sank no more,—there is no weight
Can follow here, however great.
From off my breast I felt it roll,
And as it went my tortured soul
Burst forth and fled in such a gust
That all about me swirled the dust.
Deep in the earth I rested now;
Cool is its hand upon the brow
And soft its breast beneath the head
Of one who is so gladly dead.
And all at once, and over all
The pitying rain began to fall;
I lay and heard each pattering hoof
Upon my lowly, thatched roof,
And seemed to love the sound far more
Than ever I had done before.
For rain it hath a friendly sound
To one who’s six feet underground;
And scarce the friendly voice or face:
A grave is such a quiet place.
The rain, I said, is kind to come
And speak to me in my new home.
I would I were alive again
To kiss the fingers of the rain,
To drink into my eyes the shine
Of every slanting silver line,
To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze
From drenched and dripping apple-trees.
For soon the shower will be done,
And then the broad face of the sun
Will laugh above the rain-soaked earth
Until the world with answering mirth
Shakes joyously, and each round drop
Rolls, twinkling, from its grass-blade top.
How can I bear it; buried here,
While overhead the sky grows clear
And blue again after the storm?
O, multi-colored, multiform,
Beloved beauty over me,
That I shall never, never see
Again! Spring-silver, autumn-gold,
That I shall never more behold!
Sleeping your myriad magics through,
Close-sepulchred away from you!
O God, I cried, give me new birth,
And put me back upon the earth!
Upset each cloud’s gigantic gourd
And let the heavy rain, down-poured
In one big torrent, set me free,
Washing my grave away from me!
I ceased; and through the breathless hush
That answered me, the far-off rush
Of herald wings came whispering
Like music down the vibrant string
Of my ascending prayer, and—crash!
Before the wild wind’s whistling lash
The startled storm-clouds reared on high
And plunged in terror down the sky,
And the big rain in one black wave
Fell from the sky and struck my grave.
know not how such things can be;
I only know there came to me
A fragrance such as never clings
To aught save happy living things;
A sound as of some joyous elf
Singing sweet songs to please himself,
And, through and over everything,
A sense of glad awakening.
The grass, a-tiptoe at my ear,
Whispering to me I could hear;
I felt the rain’s cool finger-tips
Brushed tenderly across my lips,
Laid gently on my sealed sight,
And all at once the heavy night
Fell from my eyes and I could see,—
A drenched and dripping apple-tree,
A last long line of silver rain,
A sky grown clear and blue again.
And as I looked a quickening gust
Of wind blew up to me and thrust
Into my face a miracle
Of orchard-breath, and with the smell,—
I know not how such things can be!—
I breathed my soul back into me.
Ah! Up then from the ground sprang I
And hailed the earth with such a cry
As is not heard save from a man
Who has been dead, and lives again.
About the trees my arms I wound;
Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;
I raised my quivering arms on high;
I laughed and laughed into the sky,
Till at my throat a strangling sob
Caught fiercely, and a great heart-throb
Sent instant tears into my eyes;
O God, I cried, no dark disguise
Can e’er hereafter hide from me
Thou canst not move across the grass
But my quick eyes will see Thee pass,
Nor speak, however silently,
But my hushed voice will answer Thee.
I know the path that tells Thy way
Through the cool eve of every day;
God, I can push the grass apart
And lay my finger on Thy heart!
The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,—
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat—the sky.

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• • 12 Iconic Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay
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  • Renascence: and Other Poems (1917) – full text
  • A Few Figs from Thistles: Poems and Sonnets (1920, 1921) – full text
  • Second April (1921) – full text
  • The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (1922) – full text

Categories: Literary Travel, Poetry