Educational Media Reviews Online

The life and works of renowned poet Edna St.Vincent Millay are celebrated in the film Millay at Steepletop. Framed by the rugged beauty of Steepletop, her 700-acre farm nestled in the Berkshires in upstate New York, the film reveals much about the elusive poet. Affectionately known as Vincent to her family and friends, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote the main body of her work at Steepletop. With her husband, Eugen, Millay planted pine trees, reminders of her childhood home on the coast of Maine, and created a home that biographer Miriam Gurko called Millay’s “refuge, her haven, her abode of silence.”

The film captures the unadorned beauty of Millay’s weathered house and barn, fields of wildflowers, and terrain that spoke to the poet’s soul. Photographs are masterfully intertwined with readings from Millay’s most famous poems, accompanied by the sounds of singing birds and falling rain. Interviews with Millay’s youngest sister, Norma Millay Ellis, provide touching anecdotes about the poet’s rare gifts. The first woman to win a Pulitzer for poetry, Edna St. Vincent Millay received the award in 1923 for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver.