The Washington times. [volume] (Washington [D.C.]) 1902-1939, 1923-07-31
POETESS TELLS
REASON FOR
MARRYING
Beauty Not Enough" Says
Edna ST. Vincent MiIIay in
New York Hospital.
BY GEORGETTE CARNEAL
Cosmopolitan News Service.

Cosmopolitan News Service.
| NEW YORK, July 31.-Opening
the door today into certain room
in New York hospital, the curious
little voice of Edna St. Vincent
Millay, who recently was married
in haste prior to an operation for
| appendicitis, greeted me.
1 wanted to know why the
poetess-now Mrs. Boissevain-got
married and I came away with this
answer:
Beauty is not enough"
Women who think above the
common lot feel the need OF ex-
pressing themselves somehow" she
said. $50 they go out in search
Of careers. But they soon discover
that even that does not satisfy.
They grow weary. And if they can
make songs they conclude that
beauty is not enough
Like q Wax Doll.
The poetess was like a frail wax
doll all tugged up in whirl of
bed clothes. But there was her
long, slim neck rising coolly out
of it. Her tiny fingers, those
fingers that have framed so many
lovely pictures, were closed about
a heavy yellow rose that someone
had brought to her. She had smiled
not knowing who was or why
/. had come I said some awkward
thing about the outside world being
curious about her marriage. She
seemed to think that funny.
''I am only tiny part OF the
worlds unhappy heart" she said
"a sort of little vein. Women long
ago thought out my songs. Women
who don't know of me still think
them"
Edna Millay's verses are wholly
feminine, not of the aloof, superior,
man hating woman, but of the
imaginative, loving woman.
Her husbapd's first wife was Inez
Milholland. famed as the most
beautiful suffrage leader, who died
several years ago.
AS to her marriage, the why and
wherefore of it, what strange,
powerful thought prompted the
poetess who has said life can be
free" into becoming a wife, she
simply quoted her Second April"
Beauty is not enough"
DIG OukHC ~ AAhO"s
Certainly Edna Millay ought to
know. She. if anyone, has lived a
free, detached existence. She, If
anyone, ought to have discovered
infinite possibilities for beauty in
the matter of living. She has writ
ten little sketches of it now and
again. She sings, for instance, of
being "all day long on the coast
of Maine" And for her seeking,
complaining lovers she has fash
toned a frail, eternal song:
And If l love you Wednesday,
Well-What Is that to your"
She ought to know whether or
not to live a life of freedom is
satisfying. And she has concluded
that it is not.
Mrs. Boissevain's marriage &C.
Cured only a short time after that
of the well known woman illustra.
tor, Neysa McMein. Both of these
women have been to the world
representatives of that class of
woman genius, who found their
chief solace in life in the business
of expressing herself"
Yet each directly contradicted
that creed by taking a husband
Miss Millay says:
The cry or earnest, dissatisfied
youth is answered in the intense
mysteries of nature. That. sad
youth can go to the trees and come
away happy. But the cry of a
woman, that full, whole sound
that cannot be satisfied with the
mysteries of earth. There is some
thing deeper about it, something
more important. 1t is answered
ONLY nv the continuOUS love of a
man. And, once having had this
love, a woman finds that. the stars
and the trees are pathetically small
by contrast. They are purposeless.
That is probably what Miss MilIaJ
means in her nnenn I.,En a nril -