The Poetry Contest That Picked the Wrong Winner

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

In August nineteen twelve, a hard-up twenty-year-old stood up at a party at the Whitehall Inn in Camden, Maine, where her sister worked, and recited a long poem she’d written. It was called Renascence.

A guest from New York, Caroline Dow of the YWCA, was listening. Hold on to her. She matters later.

That same year the poem went in for a competition run by an anthology called The Lyric Year. The young woman had signed herself E. Vincent Millay. The editor was so impressed that, as he later recalled, he wrote back to Mister Millay.

The prizes went to three men. Renascence came fourth, which in this contest meant no money at all. And the poetry world rather lost its temper. Even the winner, Orrick Johns, felt awkward. He later admitted the prize embarrassed him, and he stayed away from the prize dinner.

Then the poet Arthur Davison Ficke wrote that no sweet young thing of twenty ever ended a poem where this one ends. That took, he reckoned, a brawny male of forty-five.

She wrote back, and enclosed her photograph. “The brawny male sends his picture,” she said, adding that she had to laugh.

Meanwhile Caroline Dow helped raise the money to send her to college. By the following autumn, Millay was at Vassar.

Years later she published a little poem called Travel, about hearing every train whistle, day and night. It ends: “there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take, no matter where it’s going.”

Fourth place, as it turned out, was a perfectly good ticket.