Collected Poems
By Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine (1892). She and her two sisters were raised by a single mother, and they grew up poor in rural Maine. In August of 1912, the 20-year-old Millay was asked to recite some poetry at an evening party at the Whitehall Inn in Camden, Maine. She had acted in local theater, and she knew how to give a good performance; and she was beautiful, slim and red-haired, with a rich voice that one reporter described as “a bronze bell.” She recited her long poem “Renascence,” which ends, “But East and West will pinch the heart / That can not keep them pushed apart; / And he whose soul is flat — the sky / Will cave in on him by and by.” One of the guests at the Whitehall was so impressed that she offered to pay for Millay to attend Vassar College.

Millay entered “Renascence” into a contest for the literary magazine The Lyric Year, where she hoped to win a cash prize. Instead, it came in fourth place, but when it was published it made Millay famous — even more so because she had not won, which caused a number of established poets to object publicly. The first-place winner announced that Millay’s poem was better than his, and refused to attend the awards ceremony, and the second-place winner offered her his money. She received congratulatory letters from many editors and poets, and she responded by sending them her photograph.

When she entered Vassar, she was the most famous student there. In 1917, she graduated and published her first book, Renascence and Other Poems (1917), and her fame preceded her to Greenwich Village, where she moved soon after. She lived in a 9-foot-wide house, and described her life as “very, very poor and very, very merry.” Years later, she wrote in a letter to her sister: “I’m so tired of hearing about ‘Renascence’ I’m nearly dead. I find it’s as hard to live down an early triumph as an early indiscretion.”

Read more about Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Featured poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

• Modern Declaration
• Dirge Without Music
• Afternoon on a Hill

The Roosevelts: An Intimate History
A Film by Ken Burns

January 30th is the birthday of the 32nd president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882). He was born in Hyde Park, New York, to one of the oldest and most prominent Dutch families in the city. His father made money in railroads and coal, and Roosevelt’s mother doted on her son, so much so that later in life, when he married Eleanor Roosevelt, his mother lived next door to them in her own townhome, which Roosevelt’s wife did not appreciate. When he was five years old, his father took him to the White House. Grover Cleveland, who was then president of the United States, greeted the boy by saying, “I have one wish for you, little man: that you will never be president of the United States.”

He was 39 years old in the summer of 1921 and on vacation in the Bay of Fundy when he went swimming in the icy waters, went home to nap, and woke up with no feeling in his legs. At first, doctors thought he had blood clots or spinal lesions. He was finally diagnosed with infantile paralysis, or polio, and retreated from public and political life to rehabilitate himself.

He swam three times a week in a pond and in the Astor pool. He visited the thermal mineral baths in Warm Springs, Georgia, and eventually bought it, making sure children and less fortunate adults could get therapy and care. In the 1920s, most people with disabilities were banished to asylums. Buildings then did not have adequate access and most wheelchairs were clunky and once-size-fits-all. Roosevelt designed his own wheelchair: it had a seat like a dining chair, slim and efficient, and bicycle-like wheels.

Roosevelt said, “Once you’ve spent two years trying to wiggle one toe, everything is in proportion.” He and a friend began throwing annual “Birthday Balls” to raise money for polio research and care (1933). The tag line for the dances was “Dance so that others may walk.” The balls became so popular that an organization was started called the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. Children were encouraged to donate 10 cents apiece to form a “march of dimes” all the way to the White House, and that’s how the March of Dimes got its name. A young researcher named Jonas Salk benefited from the donations; he eventually developed the polio vaccine.