What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay

What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay
by Daniel Mark Epstein

What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay
List Price: $17.00
Our Price: $10.69
You Save: $6.31 (37%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.22 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions


(Click here)
Buy this book at online book store in your country
Canada | UK | Germany | France

Book Summary Information

Author: Daniel Mark Epstein
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-09-01
ISBN: 0805071814
Number of pages: 328
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks

Book Reviews of What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay

Book Review: The best so far
Summary: 5 Stars

This is simply a great biography.

Apparently Epstein was able to gain access to a vast Library of Congress collection of documents on Millay that won't be released to the public until 2010. And he seems to have done an unusually good job of sorting through all this information and putting it in order.

Perhaps it's due to Epstein being a poet himself, but he's able to give a wonderfully sensitive and intelligent account of Millay's life. He's done lots of detective work, and it seems to all hold together.

It's an unbelievable story -- so American in some ways: the gilded age to ragtime to the Jazz Age, the World Wars, anti-war and women's rights, passion, poetry, Greenwich Village and the Left Bank, genius, narcissism, money, fame, sex, alcohol, drugs, a skyrocket ride from poverty to success to destruction.

And yet so un-American in its calm, well-behaved, almost English manner: no shooting, no fist-fights, no one calling the cops, a time when books of poetry sold 50,000 copies and folks jam-packed auditoriums to hear poetry readings -- think Bloomsbury secretly on meth and Virginia Woolf quietly dedicating herself to nymphomania.

Really a well-written book, and surely the best biography of Millay so far.

Summary of What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay

This is the story of a rare sort of American genius, who grew up in grinding poverty in Camden, Maine. Nothing could save the sensitive child but her talent for words, music, and drama, and an inexorable desire to be loved. When she was twenty, her poetry would make her famous; at thirty she would be loved by readers the world over.

Edna St. Vincent Millay was widely considered to be the most seductive woman of her age. Few men could resist her, and many women also fell under her spell. From the publication of her first poems until the scandal over Fatal Interview twenty years later, gossip about the poet's liberated lifestyle prompted speculation about who might be the real subject of her verses.

Using letters, diaries, and journals of the poet and her lovers that have only recently become available, Daniel Mark Epstein tells the astonishing story of the life, dedicated to art and love, that inspired the sublime lyrics of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Poet, playwright, and translator Daniel Mark Epstein certainly has the right background to understand and evaluate poet, playwright, and translator Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)--though Millay didn't write biographies. Readers of Epstein's Sister Aimee and Nat King Cole will recognize the intense personal engagement the author brings to his task. He's not afraid to express an almost physical fascination for his subjects, which is especially appropriate for the flamboyant Millay, who insisted on the right to take as many lovers as she pleased and to write about them in some of the greatest erotic poetry in American verse. Epstein focuses on that poetry, deciphering the affairs that fueled it and elucidating the boldly iconoclastic, almost cynical acceptance of love's fleeting nature that informs it. (Of the last sonnet in A Few Figs from Thistles, with its notorious putdown, "I shall forget you presently, my dear / So make the most of this, your little day," he remarks: "For a woman, not yet thirty, to compose and market such a poem... was a scandal, an alarm, and a red flag to censors.") While the Edna St. Vincent Millay who emerges in Nancy Milford's Savage Beauty is indelibly shaped by her upbringing, particularly her relationship with her mother and sisters, Epstein's Millay is a self-created goddess of love and literature. It's fascinating to compare these two biographies, published nearly simultaneously and each with considerable merits. Milford's lengthy book, the product of three decades of research, is lavish with details and comprehensive in scope. Epstein's more selective work excels in cogent summaries and forcefully stated opinions. Either book will satisfy readers with an interest in Millay or American literature; really passionate aficionados of the art of biography will want to read both. --Wendy Smith

Authors Books

Book Subjects
Most talked about in Authors Books
Bloomsbury Recalled ImageBloomsbury Recalled
by Quentin Bell
Columbia University Press; Published: 1997-01-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $19.40
Price in other shops: $29.00
William Tyndale: A Biography ImageWilliam Tyndale: A Biography
by David Daniell
Yale University Press; Published: 1994-11-30; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $62.92
Neither Saints Nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America ImageNeither Saints Nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America
by Kathleen Ann Myers
Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 2003-08-07; Paperback; Book
Best price: $14.00
Price in other shops: $45.00
Storm of Steel (Penguin Classics) ImageStorm of Steel (Penguin Classics)
by Ernst Jünger
Penguin Classics; Published: 2004-05-04; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.50
Price in other shops: $16.00
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life ImageSurprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
by C.S. Lewis
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Published: 1995-11-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $7.86
Price in other shops: $18.00
Roughing It (The Penguin American Library) ImageRoughing It (The Penguin American Library)
by Mark Twain
Penguin Classics; Published: 1981-12-17; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.65
Price in other shops: $16.00
Life Is So Good: One Man's Extraordinary Journey through the 20th Century and How he Learned to Read at Age 98 ImageLife Is So Good: One Man's Extraordinary Journey through the 20th Century and How he Learned to Read at Age 98
by George Dawson, Richard Glaubman
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 2001-06-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.75
Price in other shops: $15.00
Shakespeare: The World as Stage (Eminent Lives) ImageShakespeare: The World as Stage (Eminent Lives)
by Bill Bryson
Harper Perennial; Published: 2008-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.00
Price in other shops: $13.99
The Professor and the Madman CD ImageThe Professor and the Madman CD
by Simon Winchester
HarperAudio; Published: 2005-10-04; Audio CD; Book
Best price: $8.50
Price in other shops: $14.95
Alexander Hamilton: A Life ImageAlexander Hamilton: A Life
by Willard Sterne Randall
Harper; Published: 2003-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $5.91
Price in other shops: $32.50
Similar Books and other products
What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay ImageWhat Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay
by Daniel Mark Epstein
Henry Holt and Co.; Published: 2001-09-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $3.47
Price in other shops: $26.00
Renascence and Other Poems ImageRenascence and Other Poems
by Edna St Vinc Millay
Dorset House Publishing Co Inc; Published: 1994; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $4.39
Collected Poems (P.S.) ImageCollected Poems (P.S.)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Published: 2011-03-08; Paperback; Book
Best price: $11.99
Price in other shops: $22.99
Renascence and Other Poems (Dover Thrift Editions) ImageRenascence and Other Poems (Dover Thrift Editions)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Dover Publications; Published: 2011-11-30; Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.00
Price in other shops: $3.00
Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties ImageBobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties
by Marion Meade
Mariner Books; Published: 2005-06-06; Paperback; Book
Best price: $2.12
Price in other shops: $14.00
Millay at Steepletop ImageMillay at Steepletop
Image Entertainment; Release date: 2003-04-08; DVD
Best price: $109.99
Collected Sonnets ImageCollected Sonnets
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Harper Perennial; Published: 1988-04-13; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.04
Price in other shops: $13.99
The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Modern Library Classics) ImageThe Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Modern Library Classics)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Modern Library; Published: 2002-09-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.96
Price in other shops: $13.95
Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay ImageCollected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Harper Perennial; Published: 1981-07-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.22
Price in other shops: $22.99
Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay ImageSavage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay
by Nancy Milford
Random House Trade Paperbacks; Published: 2002-09-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.98
Price in other shops: $17.00
Book store. Illustrated catalog of books on different categories