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Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets

Elinor Wylie

by Gay Pitman Zieger

Other literary forms

Elinor Wylie (WI-lee) is primarily a poet, but she turned to long fiction to vary her writing days and to add to her income. Both genres received high praise as well as scathing criticism, and both were highly autobiographical. Her heroines were very like her, right down to their taste in clothing, and some of the other characters were easily recognizable. Her last two novels dealt with the long dead Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who could be her muse and ideal, her perfect love, because he was not there to disappoint or disillusion her.

Achievements

Elinor Wylie was honored for her poetry with the June Ellsworth Ford Prize from the Poetry Society (1921) for Nets to Catch the Wind and the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine (1928). She served as poetry editor of Vanity Fair, 1923-1925; editor of Literary Guild, 1926-1928; and contributing editor of New Republic, 1926-1928.

Biography

Elinor Morton Hoyt Hichborn Wylie Benét was born Elinor Morton Hoyt into a socially and politically prominent eastern seacoast family on September 17, 1885. Her father, Henry Martyn Hoyt, was a lawyer and future solicitor general of the United States. Her mother, Anna Morton McMichael Hoyt, was the granddaughter of a governor of Pennsylvania and the great-granddaughter of a Philadelphia mayor. Elinor was groomed to be a debutante, marry into a well-established family, and become a society hostess. She went to fine schools and certainly looked the part of a socialite with her exceptional beauty, elegant frame, and delicate and charming manner.

On December 12, 1906, hoping to fulfill her parents’ expectations, she married Philip Hichborn, the son of an admiral. President Theodore Roosevelt was a guest at the ceremony. On September 22, 1907, son Philip III was born. By this time, the marriage was not going well, with Philip having frequent outbursts of temper and Elinor not taking to motherhood. She did not fit into this life of conspicuous elegance and proper manners. She felt smothered by convention. Indeed, her own family had hidden behind a facade of respectability: Her father had a long-term mistress, her mother was a chronic hypochondriac, her brother and sister committed suicide, and another brother was unsuccessful in his attempt to end his life. Even her husband proved mentally unstable, and Wylie felt restrained by the ugly world around her.

In 1910, she ran away with Horace Wylie, the father of four children, leaving her own son to be raised by Philip’s family. In 1912, with the rumor afloat that his wife might be carrying Wylie’s child, Philip killed himself. All these sordid details provided more fodder for the gossip mills, and Elinor and Horace took up residence in France to escape the social isolation. They returned to the states in 1914, but not even their marriage in 1916 stilled the talk and scorn. They attempted to have a family, but Elinor suffered several miscarriages, had a stillborn child and one who died within a week. Horace was seventeen years her senior, and Elinor began to feel cramped in this relationship also. They separated in 1921 and divorced in 1923. In that same year, again on romantic impulse, she married her brother’s friend, William Rose Benét, a fellow poet who helped advance her career. This union also resulted in separate living quarters.

Wylie was not easy to live with. She was a narcissist, positioning a large mirror in her living room so that she could frequently catch glimpses of herself. She was mercurial, sometimes giving in to histrionics and ranting in anger, reportedly banging her head against the wall. Her tantrums were attributed to exceedingly high blood pressure and debilitating migraine headaches.

By 1928, she had met a new married man to love, Clifford Woodhouse, but although the feeling may have been returned, Woodhouse was not about to destroy his marriage. With this unconsummated relationship, she may have found the defect-free man she sought. Her final collection of poetry during her lifetime, Angels and Earthly Creatures, contained nineteen poems dedicated to this perfect love, based on pure feeling. She was ready to give up the cool detachment evidenced in so much of her poetry. She brought the completed manuscript to Benét’s house, not yet having told him of her plans to move to Paris. Sitting in the living room, she called out to Benét in the kitchen to bring her a glass of water. As he came in to hand her the glass, he saw her walking toward him. She stopped abruptly, said, “Is this what it is?” and fell dead to the floor.

The historical circumstances of her life are important for an understanding of her writing in that practically every work is directly related to a life event. Scholars can trace her tragedies, loves, and insecurities by a close reading of both her poetry and novels. Her break from Horace Wylie and turn to Benét, even her belief that she had found her first true love, were reflected in the content, form, and style of her poetry.

Analysis

Elinor Wylie’s poetry was sometimes criticized for being derivative, too close in style and form to those writers she loved best, such as William Butler Yeats, John Donne, William Shakespeare, Thomas Gray, T. S. Eliot, William Wordsworth, A. E. Housman, and Shelley. However, even the harshest critics agreed that she enriched the works by giving them her own signature. Her adoration of Shelley, thought unnatural by some, just a little bizarre by others, led her to incorporate some of his poetic structures into her own work, and he certainly affected her worldview. There was some thought that her imaginings might have had her envisioning and talking to him.

Whatever her influences, Wylie was most comfortable with the traditional sonnet form and was meticulous about the sound and look of her words even at the occasional expense of meaning. There were no wasted words. Every word was carefully chosen and used in precisely the correct form. She composed her poetry in her head before committing anything to paper and seldom changed a word.

In writing about her general themes—love, betrayal, and death—she favored certain words and images. She was fascinated with birds, wings, and feathers; with snow and wintry landscapes; with small ceramic figurines; with gemstones, particularly amber and onyx; with balsam and juniper trees; with silver; with sparkling, cold, hard diamonds; with the colors white and gold; with velvet; and with sleep and death.

Wylie’s four published collections chronicle four distinct phases of her life and reflect changes in her thinking about the most effective ways of creating works of value. Her first publication met with immediate success.

Nets to Catch the Wind

Nets to Catch the Wind, a collection of thirty-three sonnets, contained a handful of remarkable works alongside some easily forgettable offerings. She used what she liked to refer to as her “small, clean technique” with short lines in short stanzas and great clarity. One often-read poem, “The Eagle and the Mole,” advised the reader to “Avoid the reeking herd,/ Shun the polluted flock,/ Live like that stoic bird,/ The eagle of the rock” but suggested that those who needed further removal from horrible reality might “Live like the velvet mole;/ Go burrow underground./ And there hold intercourse/ With roots of trees and stones,/ With rivers at the source,/ And disembodied bones.”

The abuse and isolation heaped on Wylie for abandoning her husband and child led her not to question her actions, but to wonder at society’s reaction. Certainly the child was a victim, but her husband was seriously unstable, abusive, and not one to allow his wife to grow. She needed to escape and had not expected such a harsh reaction. She craved solitude, as expressed in another popular poem, “Sanctuary,” but could not be shut off from the admiration still afforded her by more understanding friends. She says, in building her place of isolation, she can love the “Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate/ A thread of water, churned to a milky spate/ Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones” but, when “the last brick [is] put in place, not even leaving a chink,” she asks, “How can I breathe?” and is answered, “You can’t, you fool!!”

In probably her most anthologized poem, “Velvet Shoes,” she creates a calm, silent peace with sound muffled by the snow that has covered the land in white. She says “Let us walk in the white snow/ In a soundless space;/ With footsteps quiet and slow,/ At a tranquil pace,/ Under veils of white lace.” The speaker is clad in silk shoes and her companion in wool shoes, which later become velvet shoes. “We shall walk through the still town/ In a soundless peace;/ We shall step upon white down,/ Upon silver fleece,/ Upon softer than these.”

Black Armour

In a way, Black Armour explores the inadequacies of Wylie’s earlier approach to poetry. She finds a clean style to be insufficient and realizes that she can never reach Shelley’s level of skill but tries to accept her limitations. She speaks of being torn between animosity and love for the world, wishing she could go beyond her beauty and womanhood. In keeping with the idea of protective armor, in “Now Let No Charitable Hope,” she says: “In masks outrageous and austere/ The years go by in single file;/ But none has merited my fear,/ And none has quite escaped my smile.”

Trivial Breath

Trivial Breath is dedicated to Shelley and expresses Wylie’s dismay at being alive while the poet is dead. She also suggests that she feels she is to blame for her failures in love. In “Where, O, Where,” she says: “I need not die to go/ So far you cannot know/ You shall see me no more/ Though each night I hide/ In your bed, at your side.” There is no solace in love here.

Angels and Earthly Creatures

The nineteen poems in Angels and Earthly Creatures detail Wylie’s love for Woodhouse. Toward the end, she renounces passion, wanting to return to a life of the mind. This volume is more literary and metaphysical and less clear and concrete. She notes, “I was, being human, born alone;/ I am, being woman, hard beset;/ I live by squeezing from a stone/ The little nourishment I get.” She sees herself as having finally experienced the passion that had been lacking throughout her life. However, she also recognizes death as a release. In this last collection, she showed promise of losing the cool detachment of so much of her poetry.

Bibliography

1 

Farr, Judith. The Life and Art of Elinor Wylie. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. This biography reads like a novel but is still true to actual events and supports facts with evidence.

2 

Gray, Thomas A. Elinor Wylie. New York: Twayne, 1969. Gray does not color his portrait of Wylie, being at times a little harsh.

3 

Hively, Evelyn Helmick. A Private Madness: The Genius of Elinor Wylie. Kent State University Press, 2003. A chronological treatment of Wylie’s works that examines all her major publications. Provides biographical background but concentrates on the years in which she was writing.

4 

Miller, Brett C. Flawed Light: American Women Poets and Alcohol. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2009. Miller studies how drinking and alcoholism affected prominent American women poets, and how their struggles were reflected in their poetry. Contains an informative chapter on Wylie.

5 

Olson, Stanley. Eleanor Wylie: A Biography. New York: The Dial Press, 1979. Good solid discussion, though his weather reports and inclusion of thoughts that might have been going through minds are a little disconcerting.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Zieger, Gay Pitman. "Elinor Wylie." Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets, edited by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman, Salem Press, 2011. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSPAM_13930169000205.
APA 7th
Zieger, G. P. (2011). Elinor Wylie. In R. M. Reisman (Ed.), Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Zieger, Gay Pitman. "Elinor Wylie." Edited by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman. Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2011. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.