What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay

What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Daniel Mark Epstein. Henry Holt, 300 pp., $26.00. The excitement Epstein felt gaining access to the unpublished diaries, journals, and letters that landed unprocessed in the Library of Congress, read by no more than four people since the first decades of the 20th century, is an obvious component of this addition to biographies of the charismatic, chaotic poet. Epstein paints vivid pictures of his auburn-haired heroine: overworked eldest daughter of an impoverished, all-woman household; turbulent student barely avoiding a senddown from Vassar; triumphant idol of the literary world, darkened with collapses and periods of illness. He busies himself ferreting out long-wondered-at alliances and is able, on the basis of his reading, to inform readers for the first time that the love of Millay's life, during her college years, was the elusive English editor Arthur Hooley. His rapture over her youthful beauty and determination dissi pates; by mid-book, he comments judiciously that in her compulsive love life (what's the female equivalent of womanizing, anyway?) her illnesses were occasioned not by a frail constitution but "rather a centrifugal dissolution, the emotional entropy caused by all of her affairs." He marks out the winding path of Millay's life and loves, from Hooley to the youngster George Dillon, with the poems that spring from her experiences. Most writerly biographers spend time on the literary influences that made their subjects' work what it was. Epstein concentrates on matter, not mode. At the sorry end of the poet's life we're no wiser about Millay's uses of form other than the sonnet, but much surer who made her "a ghost in marble of a girl you knew" all the way to "prisoner till my pulses stop."

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