♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: Edna St. Vincent Millay hits the nail on the head.

My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends-- It gives a lovely light!

♪ ♪ ELISA NEW: That's how, in 1920, Edna St. Vincent Millay opened the book that would make her one of the most adored poets of the 20th century.

♪ ♪ Millay's voice was new, daring.

She claimed freedoms for women hitherto reserved for men-- the freedom to love 'em and leave 'em.

And she did so in forms also previously reserved for men.

In Millay's hands, the classic love sonnet would never be quite the same.

♪ ♪ To read Millay, I gathered a group of experts: five young poets all around the age Millay was when she came to prominence; the writer of the New York Times advice column "Social Q's"; and a scholar of Millay's Greenwich Village.

I also invited two contemporary chroniclers of the artistic life, its exhilarations and perils.

And a musician whose song "Your Little Day" is based on Millay's "Sonnet IV".

- (vocalizing) NEW: With all of these, I would explore Millay as a poet of the 1920s and one whose work still speaks to love in our time.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ OLIVIA GATWOOD: "I shall forget you presently, my dear, "So make the most of this, your little day, "Your little month, your little half a year, "Ere, I forget, or die, or move away, "And we are done forever; "by and by I shall forget you, as I said, but now, "If you entreat me with your loveliest lie "I will protest you with my favorite vow.

"I would indeed that love were longer-lived, And vows were not so brittle as they are, "But so it is, and nature has contrived "To struggle on without a break thus far, "Whether or not we find what we are seeking is idle, biologically speaking."

♪ ♪ LESLIE JAMISON: One of the things that I love about this poem-- it has a recognizable shape as a sonnet about romantic love, but of course it's not a love sonnet.

It's like an anti-love sonnet.

ETHAN WANG: The sonnet, it's always been about the blossoming of love or at least the basking in that love.

Historically, when women are written about in love, um, which is to say when men write about women, um, but also maybe when women have been conditioned to write about love, it's with this incredible reliance on someone to validate them.

Women are always waiting for a man to choose her, and this is quite literally the opposite.

♪ ♪ MAN: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Rough winds... (man speaking Italian) PHILIP GALANES: Men kind of own the sonnet the way that men owned women, and so for her to turn not only the subject of the sonnet on its gender axis, but also the eyes of the sonnet.

♪ ♪ GATWOOD: "I shall forget you presently, my dear."

I mean, the first line is so passive-aggressive, because to say, "I shall forget you presently" is so harsh.

GALANES: I haven't forgotten you yet.

I will forget you definitely soon.

It inscribes a boundary.

And then to call someone "my dear," which is a term of affection.

Yeah, it's brutal.

♪ ♪ GALANES: "So make the most of this, "your little day, Your little month, your little half a year."

That half a year is the meanest one of all.

♪ ♪ She's enumerating all of them, because it gives her an opportunity to repeat the word "little."

MANASI GARG: "You should be so grateful "to revel in my presence "and make the most of my attentions while you can "because you never know when I'll take them away from you."

GALANES: The repetition not only of "little" but "your" establishes that the moment of great intimacy all belongs to the lover.

She really can scarcely be bothered with it.

This is a day that belongs to you, but other days could very well belong to many, many, many others.

It's almost as if the, this sonnet isn't written just for one person.

It starts to make you wonder if this was, in fact, a poem that she could use not once, (laughing): but time after time.

At the end of the half a year, then you have a chance to deliver this poem to somebody else.

♪ ♪ "Ere I forget, or die, or move away, And we are done forever"...

I guess you could have a great tragic moving away, but there's something a little bit more banal about that as an ending for a love affair.

(laughs) Dying is, in a way, the most romantic way for any love affair to end, right, because it means you get to love each other intensely right up until the very last minute.

NEW: Undying love was not Millay's style.

JEFFREY KENNEDY: There really was no one that we know as much about as Millay when it came to free love and it... when it came to multiple affairs.

She famously showed up late to an appointment with some gentleman that said, "Oh yeah, "I've already had three trysts today and so I'm a little tired."

(laughs) ♪ ♪ NEW: Growing up poor in Camden, Maine, Millay had a streak of independence unusual in a girl.

From an early age, she went by the name Vincent rather than Edna, and she wore men's clothes or women's as the spirit moved her.

Even as a teenager, she knew how to strike a pose and command a stage.

At 21, propelled to fame by a poem published in a well-known anthology, Vincent went on scholarship to Vassar, where the notoriety of her escapades on campus with women and off campus with men seemed only to burnish her charisma.

KENNEDY: She always had a big voice for such a small person, and yet she's got this interior life going on all of the time.

And this beauty that attracts people to her.

Yes.

Oh, absolutely.

Which I think she knew how to objectify.

She's this little 5'1", bright red gold hair who just wows them with her personality and her voice.

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY: "We were very tired, "we were very merry, we had gone back and forth "all night on the ferry.

It was bare and bright and smelled like a stable..." ♪ ♪ NEW: When Millay moved to New York City after graduation in 1917, the downtown neighborhood of Greenwich Village was just then developing its reputation as a bohemian stronghold.

The popular new magazines-- Vanity Fair, The Masses, The Smart Set-- depicted the village as a place where love of art and the art of love were cultivated with equal daring, and where older norms of marriage and family were stuff for satire.

MAN: Yabba dabba dabba!

I now pronounce you ham and eggs.

May all your children be hard boiled.

Ha ha!

NEW: It was one of those moments in history when all the rules were being broken.

♪ ♪ Between 1910 and 1920, women's fashion was transformed.

Women began showing their knees, their backs, their arms.

♪ ♪ KENNEDY: Women could smoke, not wear a corset.

♪ ♪ (car horn honking) NEW: In New York City, apartment living, for the first time, was possible for single women.

♪ ♪ Before and even during Prohibition, alcohol flowed.

And it was common for men with heated apartments to spring for a spaghetti dinner or just drinks and then offer the warmth of their beds to girls who were broke.

Millay was always game, and her capacity to consume alcohol was legend.

JAMISON: There is this image of this sort of like hard-living, bohemian, artistic self.

♪ ♪ But when you're getting drunk to the point of oblivion all the time, every day has a real horizon, a foreclosure in it, because you know how it's going to end, it's going to end with getting drunk.

And every experience is capped or limited by that state.

♪ ♪ NEW: Within a few years, Millay had established herself in literary New York as a poet, playwright, actress, and essayist.

A contributor whom editors of New York's popular magazines increasingly relied upon for copy, she was also spending a day or a month in many of their beds.

MAN: ♪ Everyone beneath the sun ♪ ♪ Is dreaming dreams, scheming schemes ♪ NEW: In the summer of 1920, she took her mother and sisters for a cheap seaside holiday to Truro, Massachusetts, on the tip of Cape Cod, which writers and artists had begun to treat as Greenwich Village by-the-sea.

MILLAY: Ere I forget, or die, or move away, and we are done forever; by and by I shall forget you, as I said, but now, If you entreat me with your loveliest lie, I will protest you with my favorite vow.

♪ ♪ NEW: Though some of her lovers back in New York had accepted themselves as "done forever", two of them-- Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop-- made their way on consecutive weekends to Truro to beg Millay's hand in marriage.

MAN: ♪ All that I want is you ♪ (singing fades out) JAMISON: "And we are done forever; "by and by I shall forget you, as I said."

"I shall forget you, as I said," it's like, wow!

This would be the third time she said the word "forget" in six lines.

"But let me remind you that I've said it twice before."

GATWOOD: Someone will tell you who they are, and in your brain, you convince yourself you can change them or that it somehow doesn't apply to you.

And she's having to remind them, "No, I already told you this was going to happen."

NEW: Though refusing Wilson and Bishop's offers of love, Millay told each they may as well stay and have some fun for the weekend.

(waves crashing, birds squawking) GARG: I thought it was cool how she was proud of having these traits that you glorify men for having and you shame women for having.

Not only was she exploring the idea of women's sexuality and empowerment, she was also exploring breaking the boundaries of monogamy.

GATWOOD: We think of marriage as a goal, when in reality, I think she's just arguing that love is a moment and like all moments, there's an end.

NATALIA ZUKERMAN: "But now, if you entreat me "with your loveliest lie, I will protest you with my favorite vow."

You're going to reel me in with your loveliest lie, because who doesn't like a bad boy-- girl, whatever-- and I'll protest you with my favorite vow.

We'll play a role, we'll play this little game where you try to get me and I'll try to protest you, even though we know that we're going to do this.

♪ ♪ RAMIREZ: Even though we would like to think that sincerity is the best aspect of love, but I think sometimes it's better not to know the truth about people, and it's better to kind of live in the excitement of the moment.

JAMISON: There's at least one type of flirting that involves this sort of wry, knowing acknowledgment of either one's own wounds or maybe the doomed nature of love, to be kind of flippant about the way that love is destined to end.

DIETZ: But in the meantime, they get their lovely, lovely lies, they get their favorite vows.

They get to have fun with it.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ NEW: Up to this point in the poem, eight lines in, Millay's use of an A-B-A-B C-D-C-D rhyme scheme suggests that her sonnet will follow the Shakespearean form: iambic pentameter of ten beats per line and three four-line quatrains clinched by a couplet.

But in the ninth line, there's an intellectual shift or technically a "volta", the classic turn that always occurs in the sonnets of the 14th-century poet Petrarch, dividing his sonnet into an eight-line octet and a six-line sestet.

Like Petrarch, Millay uses the volta to launch into new thematic terrain.

Her sestet will offer commentary-- not on this or that lover, but on the idea of enduring love itself, which, the poet argues, is no match for nature.

GALANES: "I would indeed that love were longer-lived, "And vows were not so brittle as they are, "But so it is, "and nature has contrived to struggle on "without a break thus far, "Whether or not we find what we are seeking Is idle, biologically speaking."

Before the other person can even have the opportunity to make the argument that maybe she's not let herself commit, her argument becomes, "Well, even if that's the case, nature is something neither of us can control."

(birds chirping) WILES: It almost, in a way, takes us to a state of powerlessness, because she is acknowledging that the way of the universe, the way of nature, is more powerful.

She's kind of saying that "I am powerful, but in the same time, I'm... also powerless, because that's just the way it is."

She might as well be talking about it as though she's, like, proclaiming that she's a vegetarian, you know?

Like, it's just the way that she is.

DIETZ: I think nature is more about sex.

So whether or not they find this, like, eternal, long-lost love, sex still happens.

♪ ♪ I'm wondering what she was reading about nature and finding out about humans.

She's probably for the first time learning about evolution and that, you know, we're here for such a brief little poof.

♪ ♪ WANG: Our goals tend to sometimes feel like they're disconnected from an evolutionary or a biological reality.

But why did we originally love?

Well, we loved to try to mate.

We tried to propagate ourselves as a species.

♪ ♪ NEW: By the early 20th century, Darwin's understanding of the biological function of love and sex was informing many new social movements.

19th-century books describing sex to young women had been full of moral warnings.

They focused on sex as a duty of marriage and especially, a portal to motherhood.

But new studies were exploring not just male, but female sexual desire.

In Millay's bohemian world, free love was intellectual as well as sexual, and Millay's "Dear John" letter to a lover is also a virtuoso demonstration of her poetic and intellectual prowess.

DIETZ: A lot of the sonnets I've read so far generally have one of two purposes, sometimes both combined.

One is bestowing affection upon some woman somewhere.

And the second one is more of a, like, persuasive essay.

It's really important for her to remain... certain in this poem, to not be swayed, and the sonnet provides that.

And rhyme also provides that.

There's these, these strict kind of parameters.

To whip off this amazingly conversational thing while respecting these elaborate formal rules, it makes me really respect her power as a writer.

♪ ♪ NEW: Two lines from the end of the poem we realize that, as with her lovers, so with predecessors in the sonnet.

Millay has actually taken on both Petrarch and Shakespeare at the same time, capping her Petrarchan sestet with a Shakespearean couplet.

GATWOOD: "Whether or not we find what we are seeking Is idle, biologically speaking."

JAMISON: What I love about "biologically speaking" is what she rhymes it with.

Because "whether or not we find what we are seeking"... there's maybe a little bit of, um, existential despair baked into that.

Will life deliver to us the things that our hearts long for?

And then to take that phrase and immediately deflate it.

"Biologically speaking" just feels like somebody plucked those words from a different magnetic poetry set or something.

(laughs) ♪ ♪ GALANES: "Whether or not we find what we are seeking Is idle, biologically speaking."

The pause before "biologically" is also kind of wonderful.

It's like a great little slap on the way out the door.

It's funny, the way you have to really, to make the rhythm work, you have to say "bi-o-logically."

- "Bi-o-logically."

Yeah.

Yes, there's humor, but there's also some gravitas to it.

We're here, we're organisms.

We're creating, we're living, we're dying.

What you do in the interim is not that important, really, at the end of the day.

(laughing): The end of the day, of the month, of the little year.

It's just a brief nanosecond.

♪ Broad field, bright flower ♪ ♪ Long white road... ♪ My own timeline of writing the song, I started reading her biography and the first chunk of it takes place in Maine.

♪ ♪ ♪ Old mill, gray shipyard ♪ ♪ New England where winter is king ♪ ♪ Weathered faces turn to watch the sea ♪ (voiceover): She had a father who left and a mother who really wasn't present.

By necessity, she needed to go and find work to be a single mom at the turn of the century... - Her mother.

- Yeah.

And left her girls to get themselves to school, cook meals, do the washing.

- Yeah.

And so Edna St. Vincent Millay was no stranger to domestic labor.

ZUKERMAN: ♪ Make the most of this ♪ ♪ Your little day, your little month ♪ ♪ Your half a year ♪ ♪ Struggle on, bend and break... ♪ KENNEDY: She's the provider, she's taking care of her sisters.

At different times, she's the only provider.

There seems to be almost a male approach to life that she understands she's got to have to take care of everyone and herself.

ZUKERMAN: ♪ Keep my things out of the way ♪ I saw her understanding something about... (chuckling): the larger biology of things from a young age.

♪ ♪ NEW: That larger biology of things had, since time immemorial, dictated that a woman's reproductive function defined her life choices.

Procreation would tie women to the home and all the labor that went with it.

Writing something like this, to us in the modern age, might just seem like, oh, "it's a bad breakup," and it might not seem that revolutionary, but given the role which women had in relationships, but also in society as a whole, breaking up was radical.

NEW: As a poor girl in Maine, Millay saw where romanticizing husband and home could get a woman, as her poem "Grown-up" depicts.

JAMISON: I just remember reading this poem when I was a kid, "Was it for this I uttered prayers, "And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs, "That now, domestic as a plate, I should retire at half-past eight?"

That sense of the kind of banal domesticity.

She wasn't going to be captured.

She wasn't going to be put in a box.

♪ ♪ NEW: In 1923, having just won the Pulitzer Prize, Millay shocked the world by getting married to Eugene Boissevain, a wealthy Dutch coffee importer.

♪ ♪ The couple had an open marriage, leaving each free to take lovers for a day, month, or half a year.

But they were nonetheless devoted.

Eugene built Millay a country retreat, Steepletop, that was a destination for weekend partiers.

♪ ♪ Gin flowed.

Around the pool, bathing suits were optional.

And the couple spent freely on all the comforts and luxuries Millay had never had.

But Steepletop also gave Millay a place to write and recuperate between the multi-city reading tours, where in sold-out halls she performed the works that made her the most adored American poet of her time.

MILLAY: "Whether or not we find "what we are seeking, Is idle, biologically speaking."

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