Ashley Blocker
Dr. Jeffrey Newberry
English Composition II
September 28, 2015 A Reader’s Guide to Edna ST. Vincent Millay’s “Love is Not All”
Title and Author I’ve chosen to research Edna ST. Vincent Millay, and analyze her poem “Love is Not All”. Edna ST. Vincent Millay was born o February 22, 1892 and was the eldest of three daughters. Millay’s parents were Henry and Cora Millay; Millay was named after ST. Vincent’s Hospital. At the age of eight, Millay parents divorced and her father never paid the five dollars a week for child support. Millay first fell in love with poetry after flipping through the pages of her mother’s volume of William Shakespeare’s plays. Millay published her first poem in 1906. In 1911, she began “Renascence”,
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According to “On July 18, 1923 she entered into an open marriage with a debonair Dutchman, Eugen Jan Boissevain”. They did not have any children, so they toured Asia together and came back to Austerlitz, New York to live the rest of their lives. A few years later, Eugen died; which was a bit too much for Millay, so she died one year later of heart failure.
Summary of the Work “Love is Not All”, is about how the word love is used. It speaks on what love is not. Edna has been hurt so many times throughout her lifetime, and no matter what she try to do, she couldn’t find a physical thing to replace love with. Love has to come from the heart and not from material things. Love cannot heal nor can it shelter a person. Line 12 says, “I might be driven to sell your love for peace”; which is more important love or your peace of mind?
Form
“Love is Not All” is a rhymed and fixed form. As reading this poem you may think it has a stanza, because you can break it up into a stanza of four lines. When taking a closer look, the poem doesn’t have spaces between the lines or groups of lines. “Love is Not All” is a rhymed poem as well, because every other line rhymes. Take a look at the first four lines in her