The Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay

edited by Altan Ross Macdougall.Harper, $5.00.

Edna St. Vincent Millay once said that she would “rather lay a pipeline or dig a grave than write a letter. But she poured herself unstintingly into the letters she wrote, and they are wonderfully alive. They give us a warm, fascinating picture of a mercurial personality, with great sensitivity and great generosity of spirit: an artist of exacting standards who was a clear-eyed critic of her own work and deplored the “acres of had poetry which she wrote in response to the stresses of war. This is the correspondence — and, in rough outline, the life story — of a woman who lived in top gear emotionally. One finds in it much beauty, seriousness, and noble enthusiasms; much wit and boisterous high spirits; and not a little flippancy and playful nonsense, too.