The year 1918 began in fear and ended in devastation. That spring, after a long mobilization, American troops finally poured into the trenches of France. Joining the bedraggled Allies, the "doughboys" ended the “Great War,” but victory cost 115,000 American lives in just five months. While bodies piled up, civil war broke out in Russia and in Finland. Then that spring, a deadly influenza spread around the world. Before it ran its course, the "Spanish flu" would be the worst pandemic since the Black Plague, killing 50 million people, including a half million Americans. 1918. A century ago. Infant survivors of the war and the plague live among us.

We turn to poets for inspiration, but 1918 was too tough for most. Wallace Stevens wrote little that year. Robert Frost wrote a poem comparing squawking blue jays to soldiers. William Carlos Williams was haunted by the war. "Damn it," he recalled, "the freshness, the newness of a springtime which I had sensed among the others... was being blotted out by the war. . . My year, my self was being slaughtered."

With America's established poets in despair, hope was left in the hands of "a frivolous young woman," as one acquaintance described her, "with a brand-new pair of dancing slippers and a mouth like a valentine." "Vincent" proved equal to the task.

Raised in mid-coast Maine, Edna Millay had battled sorrow all her life. Her eccentric mother threw her father out of the house, then took up the task of raising three feisty girls, Edna the oldest. While their mother toiled as a seamstress, the sisters acted in plays, wrote poems, and tormented teachers unaccustomed to girls standing their ground. But the eldest soon broke out of the pack, dazzling teachers with her poems.

The world and I are young!

Never on lips of man—

Never since time began,

Has gladder song been sung

By the time she graduated from Vassar, Edna Millay was a published poet. And just before she moved to the Village, her lengthy and lilting "Renascence," in which she imagines her own burial and resurrection, filled her first book. One critic wrote: "I had not known that there was so much beauty in the world."