White Sheep, Black Sheep: The Literary Kinship of Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay

March 11, 2010Brad Fruhauff

This is an unlikely matching in terms of personality. Millay was a bohemian of the early-20th century while Dickinson was a proper Puritan of the mid-18th century. Millay apparently had a sexually "open" marriage while Dickinson lived a hermitic, single life and hardly had any male friends outside her father and brother. Millay was a kind of "bad girl" of American poetry even as Dickinson was being blessed as one of its most important early voices.