The Poetry of Wylie by Elinor Wylie
Elinor Wylie was an American poet who emerged into the literary scene with her first collection, *Nets to Catch the Wind*, published in 1921 when she was 35 years old. Her poetry often reflects a deep, personal exploration of the human experience, characterized by vivid imagery and complex emotional undercurrents. Drawing inspiration from metaphysical poets like John Donne and Dante, Wylie's work grapples with themes of desire, mortality, and the search for spiritual meaning. She is noted for her sharp wit and the intricate precision of her language, which lend her poetry a unique blend of passion and intellectual clarity.
Wylie's later collections, such as *Black Armour* and *Angels and Earthly Creatures*, showcase her evolution as a poet, moving from darker, more didactic tones to a more mature lyricism infused with warmth and wisdom. Her ability to weave personal narrative with broader philosophical inquiries has earned her a place in the canon of American poetry. Wylie's poems often convey an ambivalence toward life, portraying it as both a foe and a source of inspiration, ultimately leading to a celebration of love and creativity even in the face of death.
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The Poetry of Wylie by Elinor Wylie
First published:Nets to Catch the Wind, 1921; Black Armour, 1923; Trivial Breath, 1928; Angels and Earthly Creatures, 1929; Collected Poems of Elinor Wylie, 1932; Last Poems, 1943
Critical Evaluation:
Elinor Wylie lived in those regions of the spirit where only poets and saints are allowed to enter, saw life as a harsh riddle, and withdrew from a material world to concentrate on the intense, personal drama inside herself. Within the diminished mirror of her own mind she viewed men and landscapes, weaving in her small tapestries the record of man’s doom. Her exile guarded her from the inhumanity of life. She sketched ardent and somber portraits with firm lines.
Elinor Wylie appeared late upon the literary scene, for she was thirty-five when her first book of poems was published. She had written poetry before, but these were collected in a limited edition which was sent only to her intimates and family friends. Meanwhile she was publishing poems in various magazines and early in 1921, at the request of a publishing company, she assembled her first book of poetry, which was published later that year as NETS TO CATCH THE WIND. But publishing poetry is not a lucrative business and she began writing magazine sketches.
Her personality was contradictory, her moods fleeting and intense. One critic compared her to iced chalk, for she could be high-handed and aloof. But she could also be friendly and generous, almost childish in her delight in simple things. Like her writing, her speech revealed the wit and vigor of her mind. She had become a figure of literary legend when in 1923 she married William Rose Benet. That same year she published her second book of poems, BLACK ARMOUR, and her first novel, JENNIFER LORN.
Seventeenth century writers were the source of Elinor Wylie’s wit. She loved and admired a mind partly critical, partly imaginative, wholly subtle and ironic in its perceptions of life. Her wit is evidenced by her use of subtle thought, aristocratic scorn, the sharpened epithets, and an imagery of symbolic birds and beasts, jeweled metals, rare, exotic things of this world. These are also the lyric gifts which add sharp, dry precision to the poetry of John Donne. Like him and other metaphysical poets, she inhabited countries of the imagination. The grave was her answer to the problem of desire. She received from Donne the pride and courage of a lively mind, an instrument to use against the world’s inhumanity and man’s desire of the flesh. Thus, even if diaster strikes, the brave spirit may still preserve its own integrity.
Dante was a great metaphysical poet, as were Donne, Webster, Blake, and Emily Dickinson. To analyze or define metaphysical verse is difficult, for its aesthetic principles are based upon a system which exhibits all the precision of logic while being contained in its own imaginative wildness. This type of poetry is a literary culture which has appeared in every age in slightly different form and is based on passion and intelligence. God and the universe and the human soul lie beyond the physical world and it is in this area that metaphysical poetry attempts to express meaning in symbols of the poet’s imagination and to relate all human experience to the one great cycle of life, death, and immortality. For that reason life becomes a pattern which the poet uses to create the solid and essential fact. An image which becomes the exact likeness of both thought and feeling is one of the most characteristic devices of metaphysical poetry. By use of this image the poet’s experience becomes objective so that thought and emotion assume a new vitality of imaginative concentration. The element of surprise is another device provided by the association of apparently unrelated objects to suggest a wider range of experience than these objects commonly reveal in real life. Thus Elinor Wylie belongs to the tradition of older writers she admired, poets who used abstract ecstasy of thought and emotion as an approach to essential truths of the spirit. Her work, although original, is not free from the succession of literature.
She was extremely sensitive to the powers contained in language. The quality of her prose reflected the quality of her poetry, for actually her prose was poetic in its style and effects. She wrote with amazing precision, but this precision never sacrificed her excellent ability of phrasing, expression, or use of words. She knew exactly what she was going to say and made very few changes in a work once it was on paper.
Shelley had a great influence on Elinor Wylie. Adoring the man, she wrote about him in both poetry and prose. Her “red carpet to Shelley,” to use the title of her sonnet sequence, was her novel THE ORPHAN ANGEL. But the past was not her only literary contact, for she could list among her friends such literary figures as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Sinclair Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, and, of course, her brother-in-law, Stephen Vincent Benet. She was constantly trying to fill social obligations while working on her poetry or novels. She would escape to England whenever she could, but still she was not alone.
It was Elinor Wylie’s brilliance of technique which gave her first book, NETS TO CATCH THE WIND, its appeal to the readers of the period. Many of the poems in this collection are songs of knowledge, and they contain much bitterness. She scorned her familiar world, preferring instead empty landscapes, leaden skies, silver streams, white, frozen wintry sleep. There are times when her poems echoe resoundingly; again her lines are brief, blood-dripping daggers, and at rare intervals, tears. Life was her durable foe, she insisted, and “A Proud Lady,” “Sanctuary,” and “Valentine” bear evidence of this battle. “The Eagle and the Mole” records with bitter didacticism her wish to live free of the common world, to live alone.
Her desire to be free is a recurring theme in her later poems. BLACK ARMOUR, the title of her second volume of poetry, takes on added significance in the light of her desire to escape. Elinor Wylie used poetry as her defense against the world, but death would be her only true escape from a too-oppressive mortality. Man touches infinity when he is finally in the grave. Beneath her lines she reveals deep personal emotion, and she gained courage from her own feeling of martyrdom.
TRIVIAL BREATH, her most uneven collection, is divided between lyrics of her own personal experience and a payment of literary debts. Her dedication to the volume is a graceful acknowledgment of her debt to the English language. Elinor Wylie spent a great deal of time reading, collecting old books until her work area was practically covered with them. Her poetry and her prose show the rich coloring of the writings of the past. She could adapt her reading to her own works without destroying her own style or originality. In TRIVIAL BREATH we see the true metaphysician trying to show us that mind rather than heart governs the emotions. This philosophy is explicit in such poems as “Desolation Is a Delicate Thing,” “False Prophet,” and “Last Supper.” Death, she said, was not something to fear or hate. She welcomed the transmutation of the body and admonished her soul in bright, brittle images and metaphors.
In such poems as “Confession of Faith” and “Lament for Glasgerion,” she wore her heroic mask like a challenge. Criticism cannot discount the greatness of portrait poems such as “Miranda’s Supper,” “The Puritan’s Ballad,” and “Peter and John.” These poems show the passion and vigor of her earlier poems along with awareness of too scrupulous discrimination in her work.
ANGELS AND EARTHLY CREATURES, published shortly after her death, exhibits the fullest scope of her talent. There is little of the “over-fine” in the elegiac moods which pervade this collection. Without question this volume reveals a lyric power mature in its integrity but simple in freshness of vision. Beneath a severe articulation of phrase her poetry holds beauty and meaning. It has lost the dark didacticism shown in much of her earlier poetry, yet it retains its wisdom and intellectual clarity. It is abstract, but it is alive with passion. These poems are records of moments captured and held within firm imagery; the lyrics soar with ecstasy and bitterness that are the triumph of life over death through art.
The sonnet sequence, “One Person,” fits into the great tradition of English poetry. In it the fear of death is overcome by an exultant affirmation of love and faith. It is her most passionate revelation of the woman and poet, just as “This Corruptible” and “Hymn to Earth” are the complete expression of her philosophy.
COLLECTED POEMS OF ELINOR WYLIE contains a number of poems not previously published in book form. One of the best is “A Tear for Cressid,” which Elinor Wylie had set to a tune of her own composing. Some of the poems were written when Elinor Wylie was working on the collection titled BLACK ARMOUR. “The Heart’s Desire” was an experimental work which she liked extremely well. There are several pieces of lighter verse written chiefly for her close friends. In this group of witty and skillful pieces is a short portrait of herself, “Portrait in Black Paint, With a Very Sparing Use of Whitewash.” The humorous poem, “Cri du Coeur,” is also typical. Although she distorts the image, Elinor Wylie is still evident through the mask lightly worn.
Elinor Wylie has left behind a collection of poetry bearing the stamp of a dedicated artist. She proved through her own work what endeavor and a courageous spirit and a free mind can accomplish in a few years in a confusing world where life is constantly showing a strange, new side, but where she managed to find her purpose in life and be the master of it. Now, only her work is left to speak for her, at times seriously, sometimes half-jokingly, as in such lines as those in which she expresses a keen desire to display a generous mind rather than the polish and precision most frequently associated with her poetic style.