Edna St. Vincent Millay's "reach was remarkable, particularly in an age before television"

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/245450

Working Girl

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s most enduring muse was her heart, but her brains and strong work ethic transformed her into a literary sensation.

BY KATE BOLICK

A generation of “new women” just beginning to flex their own personal agency needed exactly such a voice, and her use of familiar, traditional forms—she was partial to rhyming couplets and the sonnet—helped deliver her version of female independence to a public newly ready to receive it. Millay became so famous so fast it’s commonly reported that in 1923 she was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In fact, she was the third. But who beyond poetry scholars remembers Sara Teasdale andMargaret Widdemer?

Millay’s reach was remarkable, particularly in an age before television. Biographer Nancy Milford recounts how, after winning the Pulitzer, Millay started traveling around the country giving readings to packed auditoriums, and for her audiences, whatever line may have existed between her life and her art was completely obscured by these performances. Onstage she appeared an astonishing creature, a real live New Yorker and honest-to-god poetess who looked and played the part: loose velvet robes dwarfed her pale, tiny frame, making her resonant voice with its clipped consonants and plummy vowels seem all the more dramatic in comparison. By then she was bobbing her hair, and after her visit to Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the campus newspaper noted that the percentage of bobbed hairstyles among students shot up from 9 percent to 63 percent.