"The bankrupt heart is free"

Edna St. Vincent Millay.
The Harp-Weaver and other poems.
New York, Harper & Brothers, 1928.

“Miss Millay belongs to an age as well as to the ages. She is dated in a good sense. Like Scoot Fitzgerald, H. L Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, prohibition, and midget golf, she belongs to a particular period. No one interested inn that period will fail to be interested in Miss Millay’s poems. . . . Her lyrics were used by the period, and she was made famous by their usefulness; but now they are inseparable from the period, and they will always illuminated the liberated Vassar girl, the jazz age, bohemianism, and the halcyon days of Greenwich Village. “
Delmore Schwartz. The Nation (December 18, 1943)

The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, people who never read poetry read hers. She was published in the elegant Vanity Fair and the not so elegant Reedy’s Mirror.
Thomas Hardy was rumored to have classed her with the Empire State Building as icon of modern New York. Her years in Greenwich Village (her house on Bedford Street the skinniest one in town) were years of celebrity. She was the national symbol for the liberated woman, the modern Sappho, her name a household word. Floyd Dell, Edmund Wilson, Arthur Davison Ficke, Witter Bynner, John Reed and others were her friends and lovers. Her two sisters and her mother were her friends and supporters as was her husband, who nursed her through her addiction in the last sad decade of her life (‘the bankrupt heart is free’).

Her dramatic poems were surprisingly formal, more radical in their spirit and content than poetic form, women had never written such poems. Anthologist Louis Untermeyer, not always as sympathizer, praised the middle of her three volumes from the Twenties:

“The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1924) wears its author’s heart on its sleeve; often, in fact, that responsive organ is displayed as a shining bauble, a decoration tricked with frayed ribbons. But here miss Millay begins to wear her heart with a difference. Rarely now is she narcissistic or consciously arch; she speaks with a disillusion that contains more than a tinge of bitterness. . . . the twenty-two sonnets which comprise Part Four of this book are not only representatives of Miss Millay’s best, but are among the finest modern examples of the form. . . “at its height, her poetry reflects the paradox of its being: it is immediate and it is immutable.”
Louis Untermeyer. Modern American Poetry (1930)