A Marriage with Different Rules

A Poetry Tale about Edna St. Vincent Millay, told by Hello Doggo.

In the summer of nineteen twenty-three, Edna Saint Vincent Millay got married at Croton-on-Hudson. Straight after the ceremony, her brand-new husband drove her to Manhattan for emergency surgery.

She told her old friend Arthur Ficke that if she died now, at least she’d be immortal. She’d just won the Pulitzer Prize. She had a point.

The husband was Eugen Boissevain, a Dutch importer, a widower, and a self-proclaimed feminist. His first wife had been the suffragist Inez Milholland. And, as the biographers tell it, he set about arranging life so that Millay could write. He ran the house. He handled the money, the reading tours and the doctors. In time he gave up his business altogether.

The other rules were just as unusual. This was an open marriage. By most accounts, both of them took other lovers.

In nineteen twenty-eight, at a reading in Chicago, she met George Dillon, a young poet fourteen years her junior. The affair that followed inspired Fatal Interview, a sequence of fifty-two sonnets.

Eugen knew. The biographers agree on that much. How he felt about it is another matter, and nobody can honestly say.

A couple of years before the wedding, she’d published Song of a Second April, about a spring in which everything comes back except one person. It ends: “only you are gone, you that alone I cared to keep.”

Eugen took the opposite view. As far as anyone can tell, he never tried to keep her. She stayed for twenty-six years, until his death.