Millay Lost the Contest but Renascence Made Her Famous
Quick answer: Edna St. Vincent Millay lost The Lyric Year contest in 1912, placing fourth with Renascence. Why the losing poem ended up mattering more than the prizes.
In November 1912 the anthology The Lyric Year announced its winners, and a twenty year old from Camden, Maine learned that her poem 'Renascence' had placed fourth. Fourth meant publication in the anthology and nothing else. There were three cash prizes, and the first was five hundred dollars, serious money for a household like hers. Edna St. Vincent Millay, called Vincent at home, was the eldest daughter of a divorced travelling nurse, keeping house for two younger sisters. College was out of reach. The poem had been her one visible door, and the door had not opened.
Then something unusual happened: nearly everybody decided the judges had got it wrong. Fellow poets wrote to her. Critics singled out the fourth place poem above the winners. The first prize winner himself declared the result unjust. Losing The Lyric Year turned out to be worth more than winning it, and the mechanics of how that happened deserve the attention of anyone who has ever entered a contest and lost.
The poem
All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, 'Renascence' (1912)
The Contest
The Lyric Year was a one-off project from the publisher Mitchell Kennerley, edited by Ferdinand Earle: an anthology of the hundred best American poems of the year, chosen from open submissions, with cash prizes for the top three. Entries reportedly ran to the thousands, roughly ten thousand by the commonly repeated figure. Earle read 'Renascence' and championed it for first place, but he was one judge among three, and the others outvoted him.
The final order gave first prize to Orrick Johns for 'Second Avenue', a poem of urban social realism, with Thomas Augustine Daly and George Sterling taking the other two awards. 'Renascence', a 200 plus line vision of death, burial and rebirth written in tight tetrameter couplets by an unknown girl from coastal Maine, took fourth. It received publication in the anthology, no money, and, as it turned out, the whole future.
The Winner Would Not Celebrate
Orrick Johns is remembered today mostly for his reaction to his own victory. He later wrote that he regarded the award as unfair, since 'Renascence' was plainly the better poem, and he considered the situation embarrassing enough that he stayed away from the celebratory banquet in New York. It is one of the few recorded cases of a contest winner effectively conceding to a loser.
Meanwhile the anthology found readers, and readers found the fourth place poem. The poets Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke wrote to Millay half in disbelief, teasing that such a poem could hardly be the work of a twenty year old girl and reads more like the product of a seasoned man. Her reply was tart, funny and entirely unintimidated, and the exchange began friendships that lasted much of her life. The loss had become a story, and the story travelled further than any prize announcement could.
A Girl, a Mountain, a Hotel Party
'Renascence' began where Millay lived. From Mount Battie, above Camden, you can see the three long mountains and the islands of Penobscot Bay that open the poem. She drafted it in her late teens while running her mother's household, cooking and mending around the writing. The poem imagines its speaker pressed into the grave by the weight of all the world's suffering, then washed back into life by rain, and it ends with the earth made new. Ambitious is a mild word for it.
The second stroke of fortune arrived in the summer of 1912, before the results were even out. At an end of season party at Camden's Whitehall Inn, Millay recited 'Renascence' for the guests. Among them was Caroline B. Dow, head of the YWCA National Training School in New York, who was so struck that she undertook to raise the money to send Millay to college. After a preparatory semester at Barnard, Millay entered Vassar in 1913 and graduated in 1917. A recitation at a hotel party did what the contest would not.
The Career the Loss Built
Kennerley, the contest's own publisher, brought out her first book, Renascence and Other Poems, in 1917, the year she left Vassar. She moved to Greenwich Village, acted, wrote, and became the defining poetic voice of that place and moment. A Few Figs from Thistles followed in 1920, with its famous burning candle, and in 1923 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the first woman to do so.
By the mid 1920s Millay was that rarest thing, a poet who filled auditoriums. Her reading tours sold out across the country. Every stage of that career traces back through Vassar and the Whitehall Inn to a poem that, by the official record of the only contest it ever entered, was the fourth best American poem of 1912.
Why Losing Worked, Honestly
Three things converted the loss into a launch, and it is worth being precise about them. First, the poem was in the book. The Lyric Year printed all hundred selections, so readers could compare the fourth place poem against the winners and reach their own verdict, which they noisily did. A losing poem locked in a drawer generates no scandal. Second, the injustice itself became publicity; critics enjoy correcting judges even more than they enjoy praising poets. Third, and this part is luck, the right listener happened to be at the right hotel party, and the right editor had already fallen for the poem.
What Millay controlled was none of that. What she controlled was the poem's quality and its circulation: she wrote something remarkable, sent it out, and then read it aloud to strangers at every chance. The rest was weather.
For the Contest Entrant in You
Every judged competition since 1912 has repeated the lesson in miniature: placement is a committee's compromise, not a measurement of worth. Judges disagree; Earle fought for 'Renascence' and lost the vote. If you entered, placed nowhere, and still believe in the poem, you are in historically excellent company, and the correct response is Millay's, which was to keep the poem moving through the world.
This is also why feedback beats silence. A ranking with a score attached tells you where one panel of readers placed you and gives you something to work against; Writory's monthly contest was built on that idea, with entries open from the 1st to the 25th, results on the 30th, and a score for every single entrant across creativity, emotion, structure, language and theme. Millay never got a score sheet. She got fourth place and made it immortal. You can do a lot with less than that.
What poets can take from this
- A strong losing poem in a published anthology beats a winning poem nobody reads; visibility is the real prize.
- Recite your best poem from memory at every opportunity; you never know who is in the room.
- When judges split over your work, take it as evidence of voice, not failure.
- Write the ambitious poem; a 200 line vision from an unknown twenty year old is what caused the scandal.
- Keep the champions you gain from a loss; Millay's contest admirers became lifelong allies.
- Resubmit and re-enter; one verdict is data, not destiny.
Try it yourself
Stand somewhere high, real or remembered, and write a poem that begins with the literal inventory of what you can see, then breaks through the visible into what the view cannot show. Keep Millay's discipline: strict short lines, no matter how large the subject grows.
Questions
Did Renascence win The Lyric Year contest?
No. It placed fourth in 1912, outside the three cash prizes. First prize went to Orrick Johns, who later said the result was unjust and skipped the banquet. The uproar over the ranking made 'Renascence' and Millay famous.
How old was Millay when she wrote Renascence?
She drafted it in her late teens in Camden, Maine, and was twenty when it was published in The Lyric Year anthology in November 1912.
Was Millay really the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry?
Yes, she won it in 1923, recognising The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver alongside other recent work. It confirmed the reputation that the 1912 contest loss had started building a decade earlier.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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