SOURCE: "The Ghostly Member," in Poetry in Our Time, Columbia University Press, 1956, pp. 220-53.

In the following excerpt from her collection of critical essays, Deutsch discusses Wylie's metaphysical style in comparison to traditional metaphysical poets.

Working closely within the tradition, Mrs. Wylie had the craftsman's concern for phrasing, and for the particular qualities of words. Her poem, "Bronze Trumpets and Sea Water—On Turning Latin into English," is eloquent of this. She never indulged in the verbal sport of Edith Sitwell and Wallace Stevens, nor rose to their imaginative power. She cherished her nouns and adjectives as she did such ornaments of life as rich stuffs, fine china, tooled volumes, gardens, jewels. If her verse displays the conceits of seventeenth-century poetry and sometimes approaches its passionate intellectualism, it can also breathe the cool elegance of the eighteenth century, and is relatively free of a Shelleyan vagueness. Mrs. Wylie's...