All about Edna: a new biography reveals Jazz Age poet Edna St. Vincent Millay as a bisexual, morphine-addicted hell-raiser.

Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay * Nancy Milford * Random House * $29.95

As Nancy Milford reveals in her compulsively readable and highly entertaining new biography, Savage Beauty, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay could be willful, petulant, self-absorbed, and utterly bewitching. In other words, the gal was a definite diva. No wonder people loved her.

Dubbed "poet-girl" by the press and called simply Vincent by her friends and family, she was such a sensation during the 1920s and '30s that a Millay cult formed. These fervid fans, largely smitten young women, would flock to her readings and, as Millford reports, on at least one occasion caused a near riot. An ethereal beauty with wavy fire-red hair and a penetrating gaze, Millay had a captivating speaking voice. Deep and resonant and quite seductive, it proved particularly effective for reciting the pithy, sexy verse that by 1930 had made her a national icon: "My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--/ It gives a lovely light!"

Born in 1892 in a hardscrabble Maine town, the first of three daughters in an all-female household, the young Millay was extremely disciplined and precociously self-possessed. She began writing poetry in her teens and by the ripe age of 16 had presented her mother with a collection of her verse, brazenly titled Poetical Works q[ Edema St. Vincent Millay. By age 20 she attracted national attention when a lyric poem of hers was chosen as one of the best 100 poems of the year. And by 31 she was already world-famous, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and a public symbol of female sexual liberation. Privately she lived the erotically adventurous life she wrote about, pursuing lovers of both sexes while devotedly married to one man, Eugen Boissevain, for over 25 years.

Through extensive citations of Millay's personal letters and diaries, poetry excerpts, and a smattering of interviews (mostly in the form of amusing but not always informative exchanges with the late Norma Millay, Edna's sister), Milford, author of the best-selling bio Zelda, captures her current subject's talent and tempestuous personality. She examines Millay's lesbian affairs, begun at Vassar, and her eventful, sexually charged life in bohemian Greenwich Village and Jazz Age Paris. Although Savage Beauty feels bloated in places, occasionally bogged down by gossip and gratuitous details, Milford is an engaging storyteller and particularly effective in evoking the complicated bonds between Millay, her irrepressible mom, Cora, and two sisters, Kathleen and Nonna.

As women alone in a man's world, the Millays developed a relationship of mutual dependency, rivalry, and recrimination. Although Edna could be selfishly free-spirited and indulgently infantile, she was also a woman with a cross to bear--namely, the responsibility of her family's well-being. Neither as capable nor as talented as their beloved Vincent Cora, Norma, and Kathleen both milked and resented their kin's success. As Millay grew older, she collapsed under the weight of real and self-imposed pressures, turning to alcohol and, after an auto accident, morphine to dull her chronic physical and psychic pain.

Sadly, the last years of Millay's life were marked by economic hardship and addiction. At age 58 she died after breaking her neck in a fall that was possibly intentional. Yet when taking into account Millay's obstacles, her artistic achievements, and how doggedly she marched to her own drummer, the reader is apt to overlook her flaws as readily as did those fervid fans almost a century ago.

Find links to additional information about Edna St. Vincent Millay and where to buy her works or this biography at www.advocate.com

Bahr writes for The New York Times and New York magazine.