Reviewed by Tara Lohan

Edna St. Vincent Millay once said that to publish a book, a person "willfully appears before the populace with his pants down." Nancy Milford’s newest work of literary biography, Savage Beauty, reveals Millay’s life with the same unabashed resolve.

Milford’s exhaustive 500-page work leaves seemingly little of the poet’s life unexplored. Hundreds of Millay’s personal letters, both written and received, appear throughout, along with unpublished poems, telegrams, childhood stories, a log of her morphine addiction, and countless impressions from her lovers, friends, colleagues and critics.

Millay was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. With a single poem, "First Fig," she heralded the New Woman and became "the lyric voice" of the Jazz Age and author of "the anthem of her generation," as Milford records.

Millay once told a reporter, "I want to write so those who read me will say... ‘Life can be exciting and free and intense.’ I really mean it." Milford takes Millay’s own words to heart and brings the reader into the life of a woman who embraced her own freedom — with all its glories and pitfalls. Millay defied the conventions of both women and poets of her time, and Milford stretches the bounds of literary biography to encompass her audacity.

Savage Beauty was thirty years in the writing and is worth the wait. Milford has fashioned an intimate portrait of a woman whose poems changed poetry itself. Throughout the book, the reader hears Millay’s own voice: silly and tragic, vulnerable and unrelenting.