Milay.

While many places may claim her, her birthplace in Rockland, Maine, her childhood home in Camden of the same state, Poughkeepsie where she wowed them at Vassar, even Paris where she made a splash, we, here in New York, sing her praises perhaps the loudest, the city where she wandered Greenwich Village at the height of its Bohemia, and produced some of the loveliest poetry and in particular the most splendid sonnets in the English language, certainly the American canon. I love Edna St. Vincent Millay for her complicated heart. Hers was raw and fierce and brutally honest. As wonderful as life was, it was a painful affair to be sure, and as full as life was, it was unfair that it be snatched from even anyone in death. She lived by Thomas' words, raging against the dying of the light. In the poem below, she turns beauty on its head and I understand the terror of a brightness so brilliant that it blinds, the darkness in the light, an unrequited, thwarted love, the foul fairness, the poisonous libations that both beckon and maim:

When I too long have looked upon your face,
Wherein for me a brightness unobscured
Save by the mists of brightness has its place,
And terrible beauty not to be endured,
I turn away reluctant from your light,
And stand irresolute, a mind undone,
A silly, dazzled thing deprived of sight
From having looked too long upon the sun.
Then is my daily life a narrow room
In which a little while, uncertainly,
Surrounded by impenetrable gloom,
Among familiar things grown strange to me
Making my way, I pause; and feel, and hark,
Till I become accustomed to the dark.