AUSTERLITZ, NY - Sept. 22, 2003 (Send2Press Newswire) - Visitors to the gravesite of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay can now read selections from her nature poems as they make the half-mile trek through the woods behind her former home in Columbia County, New York.

The new Millay Poetry Trail was dedicated here yesterday as a highlight of the second annual benefit Garden Party sponsored by the Friends of Millay to begin restoration of the gardens and home where the poet lived from 1925 until her death in 1950.

The poems mounted on cedar posts along the trail include excerpts from Renascence (1912), The Little Ghost (1917), Afternoon on a Hill (1917), Elegy Before Death (1918), Mariposa (1921), Portrait by a Neighbour (1922), The Goose-Girl (1923), Counting-out Rhyme (1928), A Very Little Sphinx (1929), Through the Green forest (1940), and Steepletop (c. 1935).

The Millay Poetry Trail was initiated by Catryna Ten Eyck Seymour, co-chair of the Friends of the Millay Society, based on a similar trail behind the Robert Frost home in Franconia, NH. The Trail is a gift from the Friends organization in honor of Millay's literary executor, Elizabeth Barnett, who has safeguarded the home and its contents since the death of the poet's sister, Norma Millay, in 1986.

Attendees at the Garden Party were given a rare chance to see inside the house, A National Historic Landmark that includes Millay's personal library. They also heard a talk on Millay's importance as an American literary figure by J.D. McClatchy, Editor of the Yale Review, and poetry readings by Millay scholar Holly Peppe. Co-chairs of the event were Barbara Cohen, Alison Lankenau and Mary Ann Mailman.

Organization Website: n/a
Source of News: Friends of the Millay Society at Steepletop

New York Community Newswire / Books and Authors Newswire
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