In the Galleries: "The Harp Weaver" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

In 1923, Edna St. Vincent Millay was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (1921). That prize-winning book was an expanded commercial edition of the poems in this volume. The longer book was published by Harper and Brothers and contained these poems, another poem published first by Frank Shay, The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (1921), and a handful of additional new verses.

Millay’s The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver was one of four volumes that came to represent the chapbook series Salvo that Shay published from the shop. A “salvo” is a burst of gunfire, and these little volumes were likewise meant as small but powerful bursts of energy. Millay’s volume was the most influential of the series.

Shay, the owner of the Greenwich Village bookshop, was a natural salesman. Actor and playwright Holland Hudson wrote that Shay used his windows wisely to draw customers into his shop. Millay’s bibliographer Karl Yost noted that for the total edition of 500 copies, Shay printed most of the copies in orange, but he also printed a small number of each in “red, dark green, apple green, yellow, and blue.” Yost explains Shay did this so that he could create striking window displays. Shay’s wife, the artist Fern Forrester Shay, created the cover art and interior illustrations for this volume. The Ransom Center only owns covers in green, blue, and red. The imprint inside the volume reads, “printed for Frank Shay and sold by him at 4 Christopher St., in the shadow of old Jefferson Market, 1922.”

The Ballad of the Harp Weaver includes some of Millay’s most famous poems and may be read in full in the online exhibition.

Several copies of Millay’s The Ballad of the Harp Weaver can be seen in the exhibition The Greenwich Village bookshop Door: A Portal to Bohemia, 1920–1925, on display through January 22.