Three weeks ago, I featured the poem Amor Mundi by Christina Rossetti, whose life and work were profoundly influenced by her deep religious faith. This week's poem is by Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose life and work were just as profoundly influenced by her sensuality and promiscuity. This observation is not a judgmental charge by a chauvinistic male. Vincent Millay's sexual proclivities were as much a part of her public and private persona as a lack of worldly experience was to Emily Dickinson. It runs like a stream through a recent Millay biography entitled Savage Beauty, written by Nancy Milford, which is, by the way, a great read.

Needless to say, Millay led an extraordinary life. She grew up in poverty, in the smallest house, in the poorest part of a little mill town in Maine, one of three daughters of a divorced mother, who was absent for months at a time, working as a live-in, practical nurse for families around the state. The girls played fantasy games and made up songs to make the cold winters, the housework, the loneliness, and the poverty seem like fun.

("At night , sometimes, we would lie in bed together, huddled against the cold, pretending to be brides, and little Kathleen would call out, 'Goodnight, Cherest!' in the direction we thought our mother would be.")

When she was 19, Vincent, as she was called (that was her middle name, derived from St. Vincent's hospital, where she was born) wrote a poem called Renascence, and entered it in a national poetry contest that featured a $500 prize. One of the judges voted to give her poem first prize. The other two didn't. But her poem was published and recognized in all the right circles as the work an extraordinary talent, which attracted the attention of a rich matron who sponsored her enrollment in Vassar, and the rest is history, as they say.

Millay was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. As the dust jacket for Savage Beauty puts it: "If F. Scott Fitzgerald was the hero of the Jazz Age, Edna St. Vincent Millay, as audacious in her love affairs as she was in her art, was its heroine . . . Her voice was an instrument of seduction, and her impact on crowds, and on men, was legendary. Young women styled themselves in her image-fairylike, taunting, free."

In one sense, Millay led a life of excitement and glamour. She was famous around the world and traveled throughout Europe, living at various times in London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, and Budapest. She once made a trip through the wild countryside of Albania on horseback. She had love affairs and sexual liaisons with an astonishing array of leading literary lights of her time, as well as with bartenders and casual acquaintances, all the while writing prize winning poetry. But her life was also marked by great sorrow and pain, caused by bad health, drug and alcohol abuse, and myriad emotional problems.

I have been a fan of Millay's since high school. I am so fond of so many of her poems that I had a terrible time trying to decide which one to feature. I decided to go with Sonnet IV from A Few Figs From Thistles, the little book that is probably most responsible for turning her into an immensely popular poet. It contains what are certainly her best known verses: "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! And, "Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand: come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!"

When this book was published in 1920, Millay was living in Greenwich Village and was romantically involved with both Edmund Wilson and John Bishop. Her personal life was in shambles and she was suffering from bad health due to a botched abortion. It is not my favorite poem or hers, but it is a haunting sonnet and provides, I believe, a wonderful introduction to Edna St. Vincent Millay and her poetry.