What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay , by Daniel Mark Epstein. Henry Holt, 300 pages, $26.

Edna St. Vincent Millay–famed lover of scores of men and women, a poet whose passionate verse set the Jazz Age generation on fire, an alcoholic morphine addict, a propagandist, actress and playwright–was a rather boring person. Not boring in her deeds, certainly, but in her private life a petty, petulant, vain woman of uncommon self-absorption, endless intestinal troubles, constant baby-talk and countless other sentimental cutenesses.

She called herself "Vincent"–and sometimes "Little Wincy-Pince." She wrote frequently to her "Muddy" and her husband, "Skiddlepins." When engaged in epistolary flirtation, she was painfully obvious. She wrote to a married man of her acquaintance, "People fall in love with me, and annoy me and distress me and flatter me and excite me and–and all that sort of thing. But no one speaks to me. I sometimes think that no one can. Can you?" Most of her correspondence is about humdrum matters: "You see, we have had living with us for three weeks now six masons, four plumbers, two carpenters, two ineffectual and transient servants, and fifteen insubordinate and mischievous berry-picking children … they appear in the morning before we are dressed and tramp through the bedrooms without knocking, bearing ladders and bricks and trowels and buckets of cement." She rarely mentions other people, except in terms of her own feelings about them.

The strength of Millay's poetry comes from the same selfishness that weakens her diaries and correspondence. Beginning with "Renascence," the poem that introduced her to fame, Millay's best work was born of close examination of her own emotions, her experience of love and her fascination with death. A Few Figs from Thistles , the volume that cemented her status as America's star "girl poet," reflected her experiences in Greenwich Village in the 20's. She lived in a series of cold-water walk-ups, wrote and performed for the Provincetown Playhouse, ran with the literary crowd at countless liquored-up cocktail parties and in speakeasies like Chumley's. She thrived on the fleeting affairs, the excitement of living in a community of artists, the thrill of feeling young and free and full of life: "Cut if you will, with Sleep's dull knife, / Each day to half its length, my friend, / The years that Time take off my life, / He'll take from off the other end!"

In What Lips My Lips Have Kissed , Daniel Epstein explains that "Vincent, standing five feet, one inch, had measurements of 34-22-34. Her breasts were surprisingly large and perfectly formed …. So when this small, mysterious child-woman took her clothes off, and stood naked before a man for the first time, the light of her beauty was blinding. There were many men who were never able to get over it." Though Mr. Epstein was born too late to actually clap eyes on Millay's "petite but perfectly formed figure" (he's had to content himself with the worshipful examination of a collection of nude photographs), he's clearly besotted, and What Lips My Lips Have Kissed is an extremely silly book. But it does give you an idea of why Millay had such a busy time in the Village.

Later–20 years and several unspectacular volumes of poetry later–as a married woman living on a farm in upstate New York, she produced a new and different popular success: the sonnet sequence Fatal Interview . These poems grew out of her affair with 23-year-old George Dillon, and in addition to her usual intensity and vividness, the book reveals a new maturity. "Of all alive/ I only in such utter, ancient way / Do suffer love; in me alone survive / The unregenerate passions of a day / When treacherous queens, with death upon the tread, / Heedless and willful, took their knights to bed." The frolicsome playfulness and carefree attitude that marked Figs has faded. Fatal Interview addresses the loss of power and the passing of time. "When we are old and these rejoicing veins / Are frosty channels to a muted stream, / And out of all our burning there remains / No feeblest spark to fire us, even in dream, / This be our solace: that it was not said / When we were young and warm and in our prime, / Upon our couch we lay as lie the dead, / Sleeping away the unreturning time."

When Millay turned her artistic attentions away from her inner life, to write patriotic doggerel or to tell touching tales, her work suffered. Always vulnerable to the lure of the sentimental, she succumbed totally in her weaker poems. "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver" tells the story of an impoverished mother who weaves on a harp in order to provide a wardrobe for her son. It could be the cast-aside draft of an Oscar Wilde fairy tale: The little boy wakes on Christmas morning to find his mother sitting at her harp with "A smile about her lips, / And a light about her head, / And her hands in the harp-strings / Frozen dead. / And piled up beside her / And toppling to the skies, / Were the clothes of a king's son, / Just my size."

Nancy Milford's Savage Beauty is the product of 30 years of work, and it shows. The book's great strengths are the interviews with Millay's friends and family, which serve as a counterweight to the daily schedules and complaints about illness in the diaries and correspondence. (A sample of the latter: On visiting one of Paris' most famous salons, she wrote, "It's going to be awful, such a noisy crowd … I'm going to wear my simple little black ensemble from Worth's.")

Everyone who knew her agrees that Millay was unusually vibrant and magnetic, but her own papers do not show this, and we get a better sense of her from others' memories. Norma Ellis, the poet's sister, recalls "There was this Swedish writer …. He'd been in the bath, he said, when a bee alighted on the tip of his penis …. And as quick as a wink Vincent said, 'Where the bee sucks, there suck I.' You see, she could say such things, and did say them, immediately, without a moment's thought." A friend remembers "She was a little bitch, a genius, a cross between a gamin and an angel …. She really never loved anyone except herself …. She might have left [my husband] alone, but not that, either … she twisted a little green ring on her finger. 'Josef gave it to me,' she said absolutely brutally, 'But he really cares for you.'" Savage Beauty would be a better book if Ms. Milford had lavished less attention (and fewer pages) on minutiae gleaned from Millay's personal papers, and made more of the revealing gossipy anecdotes provided by her contemporaries.

Ms. Milford opens a window on Millay's fascinating relationship with her mother, Cora. It was, to put it mildly, complex. In one letter, Millay wrote, "If I didn't keep calling you mother, anybody reading this would think I was writing to my sweetheart. And he would be quite right." Or this: "Do you suppose, when you & I are dead, dear, they will publish the Love Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay & Her Mother ?" But like all her love affairs, the poet's affair with Cora was tortured. She could be a cruel daughter. In Paris, where the two women shared an apartment, Vincent drove her mother crazy with her romantic indiscretion. She had an affair with the painter Daubigny, about whom Cora said, "She knows he makes me ill near to death …. O Christ! Why am I her mother! Why am I so near that I must know? … It is as if I were in the room. She does not always lock her door–I have blundered in there more than once and surprised her in his embrace–God damn his soul!" When Vincent became pregnant (by person or persons unknown), Cora concocted an herb mixture to abort her potential grandchild. Nine years later, Cora's death sent her daughter on a binge of drunkenness and morphine abuse which ended when she died falling down a flight of stairs; Millay was 58 years old.

Ms. Milford's previous book, the best-selling Zelda , a biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, succeeded in part because Zelda herself is so compelling–her fiction is of little interest compared with her Catherine-wheel life. This time around, the opposite is true. Edna St. Vincent Millay's poetry is vital, visceral, immediate and delightfully lyrical. Yes, she lived in Greenwich Village in the 20's and in Paris in the 30's; yes, she was a self-described nymphomaniac, a colossal celebrity, the recipient of dozens of honors. But the best of her liveliness and her passion she poured into her poetry, which is still the truest record of the lovely light shed by a candle burning at both ends.

Alicia Brownell is deputy books editor of The Observer .

Of the great singing stars of the 1940's and 50's, only one–Nat King Cole–died young, at age 45. But his story is not the all-too-common one: sordid beginnings, hard-won triumph, then drink- or drug-induced tragedy. Cole's beginnings were far from sordid–his father was a minister, the family solid and close; his triumph (he was acclaimed as a phenomenon by his early teens) was hard won only in the sense that he worked hard to achieve it; and although he liked to drink, and enjoyed more women than he was married to, his only real addiction was to tobacco, which killed him as surely as heroin killed Billie Holiday. Why, then, does his story sound the note of a cautionary tale?

You will not find the answers in Daniel Mark Epstein's very peculiar biography, Nat King Cole . The only caution the author preaches is about smoking–his book is punctuated with great moments in the history of the tobacco industry ("That year [1946] a tormented chemist at Lorillard wrote a letter to the manufacturing committee …"). Although Mr. Epstein has a real sympathy for his subject, punctiliously tracks his career and can write tellingly about his music, he doesn't begin to grasp the complexities and ironies of the life.

Cole began as a jazz piano prodigy in Chicago, and by the time he was 20, in 1939, his trio was famous; with his deceptively light and witty touch at the piano, he was up there with Earl Hines, Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson. But unlike his great contemporaries, he edged away from jazz to establish himself as a hugely popular romantic ballad singer, as likely to be backed by a consort of violins as by a swinging trio. No male black entertainer until Cole had managed to be accepted this way by a white audience–Billy Eckstine was too blatantly sexual, Louis Armstrong too raucously comical. In contrast, Cole was a sincere and modest "Negro" whom white boys and girls could relax making out to. You can call "(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons" and "Nature Boy" glorious or silly (or both), but you can't possibly find them threatening.

Cole's second wife, Maria, had been raised by her aunt, a nationally renowned educator (Nat never finished high school), and Nat was stunned by her beauty and stylishness, her class ; quickly, he divorced his first wife, who was 10 years his senior. Together, Maria and Nat were a formidable team, and his fame and fortune–and aspirations–swiftly grew. Yet as he moved into the world of white-dominated entertainment, he was confronted by three formidable barriers. One was redneck racism in the South, and he suffered a series of humiliating incidents that told deeply on him. One was upper-class racism in California, where a rich, white community viciously tried (and failed) to prevent the Coles from buying a house. Finally, there was the collapse of his television series–the first to feature a black artist. Advertisers balked, and the program was scuttled. Mr. Epstein is informative and understanding on these matters, and on Cole's political and racial positions in general.

And he sees that Cole became "a master of the art of concealment. The face he had prepared to face the audience of millions he now commanded was a mask that concealed anger, fear, every kind of resentment, vexation, and bitterness … His power lay in this strenuous refinement of self …" What he fails to see is that such concealment involves a profound denial of self as well as a refinement of self. We can only guess the price Cole paid for it. (One isn't surprised that Maria Cole says he rarely talked about his feelings.) Jackie Robinson showed his anger; Sidney Poitier, too. Sammy Davis Jr. clowned. Perhaps Arthur Ashe, with his dignity and grace, came closest to the Cole model, and if Ashe's story seems inspirational rather than cautionary, it may be because he controlled his feelings rather than denied them.

There have been several previous books on Cole, most notably Leslie Gourse's hack Unforgettable in 1991. This new book is many unfortunate things, but hack isn't one of them: Mr. Epstein is too subjective and idiosyncratic to master the superficial smarts of the true hack. He gets fancy rather than glib: "Then he launches into a second chorus, flying up and down the keyboard like a skylark trapped in a greenhouse, bumping into the bright boundaries of his youthful capability." Nor does he really command the cultural world he's dabbling in. Typically, he quotes without comment Cole's daughter Carol misremembering a humiliating phone call her father made to the record company he had practically kept solvent: "The receptionist answered brightly, 'Capitol Records, Home of Elvis!'" But how can a writer on popular music not be aware of Elvis' umbilical relationship with RCA Victor? And that Nat's Capitol Records had become "Home of the Beatles"?

Clearly, the entire book has been worked up too quickly and from very thin material. Mr. Epstein cites scores of newspaper and magazine articles, from which he has constructed a map of Cole's professional career. ("Quitting the Trocadero, the Trio went on the road again–to Milwaukee, Chicago, Washington, D.C., New York, Baltimore, back to the Regal Theater in Chicago for the last week in September, then on to Detroit and St. Louis.") But the heart of a biography must come from more personal sources. According to the book's notes, Mr. Epstein interviewed only 39 people (many of them tangential to the story), 32 of them only once and 28 of them between February and April of 1998. I assume that he encountered problems with the family, because although he cites four interviews with Maria Cole, he saw Cole's famous daughter Natalie only once, spoke only once, by telephone, to one of Nat's younger brothers, Isaac, and to the other, the well-regarded singer-pianist Freddy Cole, not at all. Nor is the gradual distancing of Nat from his family acknowledged–it was not only jazz that he and Maria had edged away from in his ascent into the mainstream. No wonder Nat "fainted dead away" at his mother's funeral. While Maria tells us: "I did not go to the funeral, for some reason …"

Perhaps the haste with which this book was written explains the prose. At times it is weirdly staccato: "Timmie [Rogers] was the first black comedian to face the audience in a tuxedo. Nat loved him. Timmie told his friend he was doing all right. They were both clients of G.A.C." (that is, the talent agency General Artists Corporation). When I came upon a couple of semicolons deep in the book, I fell upon them like a starving man. Sometimes the prose turns lofty ("Yes, the women had begun to scream for Nat King Cole as they screamed for Orpheus of Thrace and Frank Sinatra of Hoboken") or folksy ("Whatever the hormone shots had done for his sperm count and his vocal cords, they sure had affected his body hair"). Mr. Epstein specializes in hyperbole ("Cole and [conductor Pete] Rugolo together had forged a masterpiece, an art song fit to be compared with the best of Hugo Wolf and Gustav Mahler" ) and in cliché (people "pen" songs; things look "for all the world" like other things). He enjoys addressing the reader directly: "And what did Maria do? She did what any proud, furious wife with five children and some cash does when her husband is thinking of leaving her for another woman … she hired a private investigator …" And he has a curious affinity for the word "truly": "Truly this is one of Cole's greatest improvisations …"; "Truly, its atmosphere of Weltschmertz …" Truly, where was Mr. Epstein's editor?

Sometimes Mr. Epstein deploys imagined thoughts and feeling–the Dutch syndrome?–as in this maudlin culminating passage: "The last time [Nat] could remember being happy was in a sun-drenched room of the Fairmont Hotel with a beautiful girl, and outside their window shone the golden stairs of San Francisco that led to the sea. She had thoughts only of life, more and more life for both of them, and his fantasy of the future lay with her." This invented reverie of Cole's last days refers to the very young Swedish girl he had fallen in love with and hoped to marry. Another act of distancing? Another act of denial? Certainly, another bit of ghastly writing.

Who is Daniel Mark Epstein? He has produced six volumes of poetry and three plays, translated Plautus and Euripides (well) and written a biography of the evangelist Aimée Semple McPherson. He is enthusiastic and well intentioned. But he was not the person to write a convincing biography of Cole, that charming, talented, complicated and tragic man who was loved by millions and yet could remark to a reporter, "I can't stand the sight of myself."