Sonnet 29 by Edna St Vincent Millay — Poetry Analysis.
The speaker in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnet “Love Is Not All” describes reality and crushes the fairy tale belief that love brings infinite happiness and solves all problems. This narrator expresses her thoughts on falling in love throughout the poem; bluntly, she describes life’s most basic necessities, which love cannot replace.
Throughout much of her career, Pulitzer Prize-winner Edna St. Vincent Millay was one of the most successful and respected poets in America. She is noted for both her dramatic works, including Aria da capo, The Lamp and the Bell, and the libretto composed for an opera, The King’s Henchman, and for such lyric verses as “Renascence” and the poems found in the collections A Few Figs From.
Part 1: Scansion and Analysis In Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Love is Not All (Sonnet XXX),” the poem’s writer originally discredits the value of love, claiming that it is not essential because it does not support life; however, later Millay describes that love has some value.
Analysis of Millay’s “Not in a silver casket cool with pearls” Edna St. Vincent Millay’s unconventional childhood, growing up without a father because her mom kicked him out and having to learn independence and responsibility by the age of twelve, influenced her poetry and shaped her as an motivated and self-sufficient individual.
Much of poetry is considered self expression, and with that notion in mind, and for the sake of this analysis, I will assume that Millay is documenting her own feeling or experience even though it is definitely in the realm of possibility that Millay is speaking from the point of view of an third-party character or separate persona.
Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, on February 22, 1892. A poet and playwright poetry collections include The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (Flying Cloud Press, 1922), winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and Renascence and Other Poems (Harper, 1917) She died on October 18, 1950, in Austerlitz, New York.
Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American lyrical poet, playwright and feminist. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and was known for her activism and her many love affairs. She used the pseudonym Nancy Boyd for her prose work.