Burnout

Burnout Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford Random House. 550 pp. $29.95

What Lips My Lips Have Kissed:

The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Daniel Mark Epstein Henry Holt. 300 pp. $26. 00

ONCE, iN the earlier part of the 20th century there were writers who were literate but reached a large popular audience and who were adored both for their work and for their personae, which, combined, appeared larger than life. Living like rock stars, they tended to die in much the same manner: of liquor or drugs, burned out or suicides. Nancy Milford has written about two of them-F. Scott Fitzgerald (and his wife Zelda) and now, 30 years later, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Millay and Fitzgerald had too much in common: rocket-like ascents based on one book or one poem; dazzling reigns in their mid-- and late twenties; descents after that into valleys of ashes; early deaths at downward arcs in their careers. But while the causative factor in Fitzgerald's collapse-his wife's insanity-- is painfully evident, the reasons for

Millay's remain more mysterious. They concern things that Milford and Daniel Mark Epstein, Millay's second recent biographer, allude to and hint at, but never explain.

MILLAY WAS born in 1892 into a star-struck Maine family, dirt poor but bent on accomplishment. In 1912, one poem, "Renascence," changed her life forever. Rightly described by Epstein as a "public sensation," it brought her fame, sponsors, and a scholarship to Vassar, which was her springboard into Greenwich Village, where she arrived in 1917. The six years that followed were simply astonishing.

In 1919, her verse play, Aria da Capo, opened, a nationwide and international sensation. A collection, A Few Figs from Thistles, was published in 1920, Second April the year after, and The Harp Weaver in 1923, the year in which she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. In 1927 she wrote the libretto for an opera by Deems Taylor, The King's Henchman; the book version ran through eighteen printings. The Buck in the Snow sold an amazing 40,000 copies in 1928. At the same time, her theatrical gifts-she had trained as an actress-made her a glittering presence whose readings were sold...