MILLAY, EDNA ST. VINCENT (1892-1950)

was born in Rockland on February 22, 1892 and moved to Camden with her family when she was twelve, graduated from Camden High School, then Vassar College.

Her mother, divorced, had little money for her three daughters, but encouraged reading and music in them.  With no prospects of affording college, Edna read her new poem Renascence at a party at the Whitehall Inn in Camden.  She so impressed a woman in attendance that she financed Edna's education at Vassar.

A plaque set in stone at the top of Mount Battie in Camden commemorates the writing of the poem, supposedly  written while enjoying the view from the summit.

Many of her poems contained romantic themes of love, death, youthful rebelliousness, and the cosmos.  Later her works focused on the events of World War II.

In 1933, she and her husband bought Ragged Island, part of Harpswell, in Casco Bay.  She enjoyed wide popularity, then suffered a nervous breakdown in the late 1940's and died on October 19, 1950, in Austerlitz, New York.

Among her poems are A few Figs from Thistles, The Ballard of the Harp-Weaver, Conversation at Midnight, and The Murder of Lidice, about the destruction of a Czechoslovakian town by the Germans in World War II.