"At age 48 – looks fading, youth fading, genius (she thought) also fading — the extravagant American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay found herself staring blankly into the abyss that had moved with her all her life. Once she had written ecstatically of that 'conscious void' (her first encounter: a passage of poetry from Romeo & Juliet when she was five years old), of both 'the tangible radiance in which I stood' and 'the edge of nausea' that bordered it. Once it had left her thrilled, transcendent, outside herself; the “radiance” and the 'nausea' had been intertwined. But, at 48, interred at the farmhouse she and her husband had converted near the Berkshires, worn out by her lifelong hungers, that abyss was now dark to her — and it took it took two gin rickeys, a martini, eight cigarettes and several morphine shots, all before 1 p.m., to be able to face it. ..."
This Recording
2015 May: The Spinster Hall of Fame: Yes, Cut-out dolls of five pioneering women writers
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