SOURCE: "Elinor Wylie: 1825-1928," in More Modern American Poets, Basil Blackwell, 1954, pp. 35-40.

In the following excerpt from his collection of critical essays, Southworth faults Wylie's poetry, suggesting that it lacks the necessary quality that would enable it to maintain the status of exceptional literature over time.

Miss Elinor Wylie has been favoured with a good "press" and she has often been spoken of as one of America's great women poets…. [Although] I can admire some fifteen of her poems, I do not think Time will continue to do what her late husband and his and her friends with ready access to the public's ear were so able to do for her. The poems on which her reputation will rest are early as well as late, serious, humorous, and ironic, and are confined to no one subject. Taken in order from her Collected Poems, they are "Velvet Shoes...