Edna St. Vincent Millay, Selected Poems, edited by Colin Falck, Perennial Classics, 1991.
It's organized as chronologic excerpts from the original published volumes of poetry, with the standard title/first line index in the back. The introductory essay gives a nice sense of her place in 20th century poetry history (and why she's relatively obscure now) and how her own style developed, and elements to look for in different periods of her life. Although I tend to read by flipping through and looking to see what catches my eye, I really appreciate having the order of the poems be chronological, not alphabetical, so that I can catch the thematic/stylistic connections of any given poem.
I am also very fond of Edna St. Vincent Millay: Collected Sonnets, but I wouldn't start with that unless you have a particular passion for the sonnet form. She was a genius at sonnets, and I love reading them, but I wouldn't have been as interested in Millay to begin with if I hadn't first seen her flexibility with other forms.
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ninetydegrees
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on 2008-04-26 07:51 pm (UTC)It's organized as chronologic excerpts from the original published volumes of poetry, with the standard title/first line index in the back. The introductory essay gives a nice sense of her place in 20th century poetry history (and why she's relatively obscure now) and how her own style developed, and elements to look for in different periods of her life. Although I tend to read by flipping through and looking to see what catches my eye, I really appreciate having the order of the poems be chronological, not alphabetical, so that I can catch the thematic/stylistic connections of any given poem.
I am also very fond of Edna St. Vincent Millay: Collected Sonnets, but I wouldn't start with that unless you have a particular passion for the sonnet form. She was a genius at sonnets, and I love reading them, but I wouldn't have been as interested in Millay to begin with if I hadn't first seen her flexibility with other forms.