Bonus Edna St. Vincent Millay Quiz by StevensDN

One well known Millay sonnet begins this way:

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning…

Her use of “lips” and “arms” as a stand-in for the narrator’s lovers arguably employs what literary device, in which a part is used to represent the whole?

In this excerpt from a Millay sonnet (“How innocent of me and my dark pain”):

The gods are patient; they are slaves of Time
No less than we, and longer, at whose call
Must Phoebus rise and mount his dewy ___,
And lift the reins and start the ancient climb…

What is the missing, seemingly anachronistic three-letter word? (Hint: the line does not rhyme with the other quoted lines.)

In one poem, Millay refers to a terminated relationship, saying to her ex-lover:

And why you come complaining
Is more than I can see.
I loved you Wednesday,--yes—but what
Is that to me?

What is the name of this poem?

Millay’s relationship with George Dillon was not confined to the romantic. The pair collaborated on the translation from French of an 1857 book of poems, six of which were banned in France as obscene. Millay and Dillon’s translation was considered the authoritative English-language version for some years. The book begins with the poem “Au Lecteur” (“To the Reader”); other poems in the book include “L’Albatros” (“The Albatross”), and “Spleen.” Name the work (either the French or the English title).

Millay often reimagined figures or stories from classical and folk tales in her poetry. One of the most striking examples is a sonnet that uses a well-known story about a 15th-century French nobleman with an unsavory past; Millay transformed that into a meditation on solitude and relationship boundaries, implicitly inverting (or at least altering) gender roles in the process. What poem, titled for that folklore villain, is this?

The poem that won Millay the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for poetry tells of a mother who saves her son from freezing by making him a set of clothes with an unusual instrument. Name either the poem or the country star who recited it to music 47 years later.

Millay met a well-known artist near Millay's New York home in 1934. The artist later wrote to her:

“One day a hummingbird flew in--It fluttered against the window til I got it down where I could reach it with an open umbrella--When I had it in my hand it was so small I couldn't believe I had it--but I could feel the intense life--so intense and so tiny—

...You were like the hummingbird to me...And I am rather inclined to feel that you and I know the best part of one another without spending much time together--It is not that I fear the knowing--It is that I am at this moment willing to let you be what you are to me--it is beautiful and pure and very intensely alive.”

It is unclear whether the hummingbird in question was near an oversized flower, and it appears that Millay did not travel to New Mexico to follow up on this visit, but at any rate name the artist.

In 1933, Millay wrote to the Guggenheim Foundation to recommend a fellowship for another poet she had never met, and purported to “dislike[] . . . without ever having laid eyes on him.” She criticized his “self-satisfied and self-indulgent” writing, and complained that, while she did not “stand for the untouchable holiness of the capital letter and traditional typography,” his poetry written in English was “more difficult for me to translate than poetry written in Latin.” Yet the poet, in Millay’s view, was a “big talent”; she praised his book, “Is 5,” particularly the poem “Paris: this April sunset.” The application was ultimately accepted. Name the poet.

Millay fervently supported the United States’ participation in World War II and wrote numerous poems on the subject, the best known of which was a dramatic poem about Nazi atrocities. In reprisal for the 1942 killing of Reinhard Heydrich, a senior SS official, Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler ordered that a Czechoslovakian village be razed and all the inhabitants executed or deported. Millay’s poem portrayed the event as the “Murder” of the town; name the village.

Millay’s 1927 poem “Justice Denied in Massachusetts” echoes, and arguably mocks, T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” urging the reader, “Let us abandon then our gardens and go home . . . Let us go home, and sit in the sitting room.” Millay’s advice was ironic—she (implicitly) critiqued the alienation of Eliot’s and other modernists’ poetry, inspired by the controversial sentence imposed on what pair?

Nancy Milford’s 2001 biography of Millay, “Savage Beauty,” tells of sister Norma’s reluctance and ultimate agreement to share Millay’s personal papers and other items, though Norma decided to destroy a few things related to Millay’s sex life that, Norma felt, were too private to share. They included explicit photographs and what item made of ivory, “which Norma admitted was difficult to burn, but she’d managed”?

Also published in The Lyric Year was a poem titled “I Shall Not Care” by a writer who later became one of Millay’s Greenwich Village friends; the poem also appeared in the author’s 1915 collection Rivers to the Sea. This poet won the Pulitzer for poetry in 1918 for her collection Love Songs, though Millay soon eclipsed her both in critical reception and in notoriety. Her poems include “There Will Come Soft Rains,” which later inspired a Ray Bradbury short story; “Winter Stars”; and “The Kiss,” and her later collections include Flame and Shadow, Dark of the Moon, and, following her suicide in 1933, Strange Victory.. Name the poet.