Past the brick rowhomes that have come to define Baltimore, Emmanuel Episcopal Church, established in 1854, sits on the corner of Read and Cathedral Streets. At street level, only the abrupt appearance of rubble stone from brick indicates that there is a new building at all. That is, until the lucky passerby looks up. Towers soar above a progress of granite to white limestone, punctuated by lancet windows and tempered with light refracted through stained glass windows.

A striking example of Gothic architecture in Baltimore, the church was designed by Niernsee & Neilson (the same partnership behind the Green Mount Cemetery Chapel and Clifton Mansion.) The towers and archways invoke a time long past, of feudalistic morality and rigid social structures of the separation of the few from the struggles of the many... and yet, it was these very towers that looked down upon one of the twentieth century's most controversial and feminist writers, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

The first woman in history to receive a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Edna St. Vincent Millay, or "Vincent" as she preferred to be called, is remembered by scholar Robert Gale as the "poetic voice of eternal youth, feminine revolt and liberation, and potent sensitivity and suggestiveness." Born in 1892 and raised by an independent mother in New England, she published her first poem, Renascence, in 1912. Continuing on to Vassar College in 1913, she pursued acting and writing, flouting the rules and societal prescripts by smoking, drinking, and dating freely among the all-female population. After graduation, she moved to Greenwich Village in New York City, where she was surrounded by artists, actors, and other bon vivants. She promptly became a name in the bohemian village. It was in this time that she penned her most famous quatrain: "First Fig" from A Few Figs from Thistles (1920):

"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!"

She spent the next two years in Europe writing for Vanity Fair, producing upon her return the work that would win her the Pulitzer, The Harp Weaver and Other Poems (1923). In this and her other works, in a time when women still were fighting for the right to vote in much of the United States, Millay championed the plight of women and the oppression of traditional gender roles. She loved freely, marrying Eugen Boissevain in 1923 on the understanding that she would not be faithful, and let him manage her 91ÊÓƵ.

It was in 1925 on one of her 91ÊÓƵ that Mrs. Sally Bruce Kingsolver asked her to read at the Emmanuel Episcopal Church for the Poetry Society of Maryland. What poems she read is not recorded but she surely read with the passion of one who rubbed so far against the grain. She was the absolute embodiment of the hedonism of the 1920s, as she did what she wanted, defied convention at every turn, and presented herself to life with a passion that swept up those around her.

811 Cathedral Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

In 1934, Carl Sandburg wrote to Sally Bruce Kinsolving, "The years go by and I don't forget ever the long evening of song with you... at your house and faces and stories and moments out of that visit to Baltimore. I'm hoping to drop in again soon."

On the night of Sandburg's February 1924 visit, like many other nights, the Kinsolving home, Old St. Paul's Rectory, became a sanctuary for poets and poetry lovers alike. As co-founder of the Maryland Poetry Society, Mrs. Kinsolving frequently welcomed a variety of acclaimed poets into her home, allowing members of the society to meet their literary idols. Carl Sandburg, a three-time Pulitzer-prize winner, poet, biographer, historian, journalist, novelist and musicologist, was just one of Mrs. Kinsolving's illustrious guests. Although he visited Baltimore only once or twice, Sandburg and Mrs. Kinsolving maintained a lifelong relationship through correspondence, encouraging each other in their work and exchanging poems and folk songs.

Old St. Paul's Church built the Georgian-style rectory, where Sandburg and the Kinsolvings spent the evening, as a home for the rector in 1791. Once standing at the northern edge of the city with a spectacular view of the harbor, the Old St. Paul's Church and Rectory is a testament to the growth of Baltimore—now located within the heart of central Baltimore, surrounded by contemporary development and its view of the harbor obscured long ago.

Described by H.L. Mencken as "indubitably American in every pulse-beat," Sandburg was born in Illinois in 1878. He quit school at age thirteen, and then worked a variety of odd jobs ranging from a farmhand to a traveling salesman to a milkman to a barber. He traversed the United States as a hobo and served as a soldier in the Spanish-American War in 1898. Through these experiences, Sandburg truly saw the United States, later capturing it both in his own writing and by anthologizing the folk songs he encountered. Sandburg's love of America did not blind him to its problems and he fought passionately against a variety of social injustices.

Sandburg was never a Baltimorean, but was inextricably tied to Chicago, working at the Chicago Daily News and praising the developing industrial city in his work—notably in Chicago Poems. However, his friends in Baltimore were never far from his mind, and their letters never far from his mail box, proving what he'd once written to Mrs. Kinsolving, that "the prairies and Chesapeake Bay are neighbors now."

National Park Service.

24 W. Saratoga Street, Baltimore, MD 21201