American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923 for her poem 'The Ballad of the Harp,' a haunting story of a poor mother and her son. The poem has so endured that nearly 80 years later, Johnny Cash would recite its chilling lines.
One of the world's most influential female poets to write in English, Millay born Feb. 22, 1892 into a world with rigid expectations for women, who were expected to marry, have children, maintain a home, and keep their views to themselves. Millay flaunted every expectation.
Millay would spend her life using her poetry to define a female aesthetic that espoused liberation, polyamory and fierce self-definition. She was described by her biographer Nancy Milford, who wrote 'Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay,' as the embodiment of the New Woman. Millay, known to her family and friends as 'Vincent', refused to be defined. She loved both women and men, frequently fell in and out of intense love and maintained multiple relationships at the same time. Her poetic works and her love letters are said to have stripped relationships bare. They challenged traditional boundaries and definitions, and controversially asserted women not only had a right to pleasure but no obligation to fidelity.
Although polyamorous, Millay married in 1923. Her marriage to Eugen Boissevain was open by consent. Boissevain, who described himself as a feminist, took on the bulk of the domestic duties.
At the age 31 and in the same year of her nuptials, Millay became only the third woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver." She is perhaps best known, however for her 1920 "feminist" collection "A Few Figs From Thistles."
She died alone at age 58 in 1950, a year after her husband.