Edna St. Vincent Millay, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (in 1923, for The Harp-Weaver, and Other Poems), was known not only for her writing but for what was considered at the time to be an unconventional lifestyle. In its extensive poetry collections, The Free Library has several of her books, including: Renascence, and Other Poems ; The Ballad of the Harp Weaver ; First Fig and Other Poems ; Early Poems ; and Selected Poems .

LOVE IS NOT ALL

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink

Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;

Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink

And rise and sink and rise and sink again;

Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,

Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;

Yet many a man is making friends with death

Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It may well be that in a difficult hour,

Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,

Or nagged by want past resolution's power,

I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It well may be. I do not think I would.