Surely you're joking? Emily died a virgin, didn't she? No freak there; I don't think she ever let another human being so much as touch her hand. Edna, on the other hand, was a bisexual libertine who put Greenwich Village on the intellectual and sexual map of America. Super bangin' hott!

TOTALLY Edna St. Vincent Millay, and not just because I'm also from Maine. As anyone familiar with her poems (beside "Renascence") knows, she was dirty. And bisexual. Before it was cool to be bisexual.

Is it really Dead Poet's Society, as in the society of one Dead Poet? Or Dead Poets Society? Or Dead Poets' Society? Or Good Mrs. Doubtbot Hunting Society?

Edna, by a country mile. Such a hottie.

Edna. No contest.

That's an unfortunate title. The correct spelling is kludge.

And the answer is Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Wasn't it rumored that Emily Dickinson was a lesbian...?

"Susie, will you indeed come home next Saturday, and be my own again, and kiss me as you used to?"
Emily Dickinson

@7: That sounds more like friendships of the time than lesbianism to me. Though I am certainly no Dickinson scholar.

Well neither one do a thing for me but if I were turned on by dead female poets I'd definitely go for Edna.

Thanks for the pointer to the Kluge book, I'm definitely going to check it out.

Dickenson does have the differently-shaped eyes, which is endlessly pretty. They both, however, have weirdly skinny necks.

Couple of Min Pins.

That's a real bad picture of Millay, who in other photos is smoking-hot. Though if you got together with Emily Dickinson, well, you'd be with EMILY DICKINSON. And you'd be first.

@8 - There are a lot of scholars who think Emily Dickinson's poems were written for a woman that she had the hots for. Namely, her sister-in-law. I have no idea one way or the other; I'm just throwing it out there. :-)

I had a prof. in undergrad who was a Millay scholar. He shared stories from his research with us all the time. Yeah, she's totally hotter than Dickenson, though I like Dickenson's poetry more.

more maine solidarity. edna for the win. yea, vacationland.

Emily for the poetry, Edna for the hotness.

W7ngman @6: The Jargon File says you're wrong. The Jargon File is never wrong. It is the most important document in the history of computing.

http://catb.org/jargon/html/K/kluge.html

But Fnarf, I'm a "younger U.S. hacker".

(I already looked it up. Funny thing is, when I wrote that, I was thinking the jargon file said kludge was the official spelling.)

The variant ‘kludge’ was apparently popularized by the Datamation article mentioned under kludge; it was titled How to Design a Kludge (February 1962, pp. 30, 31). This spelling was probably imported from Great Britain, where kludge has an independent history (though this fact was largely unknown to hackers on either side of the Atlantic before a mid-1993 debate in the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers over the First and Second Edition versions of this entry; everybody used to think kludge was just a mutation of kluge). It now appears that the British, having forgotten the etymology of their own ‘kludge’ when ‘kluge’ crossed the Atlantic, repaid the U.S. by lobbing the ‘kludge’ orthography in the other direction and confusing their American cousins' spelling!

The result of this history is a tangle. Many younger U.S. hackers pronounce the word as /klooj/ but spell it, incorrectly for its meaning and pronunciation, as ‘kludge’. (Phonetically, consider huge, refuge, centrifuge, and deluge as opposed to sludge, judge, budge, and fudge. Whatever its failings in other areas, English spelling is perfectly consistent about this distinction.) British hackers mostly learned /kluhj/ orally, use it in a restricted negative sense and are at least consistent. European hackers have mostly learned the word from written American sources and tend to pronounce it /kluhj/ but use the wider American meaning!

Some observers consider this mess appropriate in view of the word's meaning.