Elinor Wylie Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Hyatt H. Waggoner

Critical Essay by Hyatt H. Waggoner

SOURCE: "Elinor Wylie," in American Poets, Louisiana State University Press, 1984, pp. 459-64.

Waggoner is a scholar noted for his studies of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In the following excerpt he discusses Emersonian aspects of Wylie's poetry.

Expressing very similar attitudes, developing often the same themes, in a style derived, like Teasdale's, from the English Romantics, particularly from Shelley, Elinor Wylie created more poems that are still good to read. The several best of them, especially "Wild Peaches" and "Innocent Landscape," are very good. Wylie's spirit was tougher than [Sara] Teasdale's had been before Strange Victory, and her mind clearer.

But what we are likely to notice first, as we read through her collected poems, is the similarity of the two. Among poets less gifted than the major figures of the age, the number of possible reactions to "the modern temper" was severely limited. Thus Wylie, echoing Teasdale,...
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