Edna St Vincent Millay (1892–1950) was one of the most popular American writers of her generation, and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Thomas Hardy once remarked that America had only two great wonders to show the world: skyscrapers, and the poetry of Edna St Vincent Millay. She was a brilliantly innovative verse technician finding latent energies in traditional forms and discovering new means of her own to express what her editor Colin Falck calls 'her complex and extremely subtle feminist consciousness, her almost Blakean sense of the mysteriousness of ordinary life.' Millay's work is resistant to theory, yet she has never forfeited the love of general readers and a new generation will still discover one of the most accomplished and passionate poets of the last century.