Edna St. Vincent Millay — Renascence on Mount Battie

In the summer of nineteen twelve, a twenty-year-old woman from Camden recited a poem in the parlor of the Whitehall Inn, a short distance south of town, and a wealthy patron in the audience was so moved that she offered to pay for the young woman's college education. The poet was Edna St. Vincent Millay. The poem was Renascence. The patron was Caroline Dow of the National Training School for the YWCA. That offer changed American literary history.

Millay had grown up in Camden in modest circumstances and climbed Mount Battie frequently as a girl. It was from the summit of the mountain that she wrote the opening lines of Renascence, looking out over the bay and the islands and attempting, she later said, to contain the whole world in one poem. Renascence is a two-hundred-line lyric in which a speaker standing on a mountain is overwhelmed by the simultaneous awareness of all human suffering, dies, is buried, and is reborn by rain. It is an enormous ambition for a teenager, and it largely succeeds.

Millay went on to Vassar College on Dow's support, then to Greenwich Village, then to a Pulitzer Prize in nineteen twenty three, the first woman to receive the prize for poetry. The summit of Mount Battie still has a plaque marking where the poem began. The Whitehall Inn still stands and keeps a room dedicated to Millay's memory.