SOURCE: "Elinor Wylie: The Puritan Marrow and the Silver Filigree," in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 4, Winter, 1963, pp. 343-57.

In the following, Gray analyzes Wylie's ability to combine Imagistic techniques and Romantic themes.

It should be obvious that quite as much banality, raw emotion, crudity of image, and bathos can be produced by Imagists as by anyone else. While often avoiding the vices of the color-mongers and jade-purveyors, [John Gould] Fletcher and [Amy] Lowell fall into equally nauseating practices. But this is not surprising where the poet's emphasis is on the purely physical, where he scrupulously divests his poetry of idea to present "things in their thinginess." In order to be fresh and original the Imagist poet must either search for new things—of which there will eventually be a limited number—or describe old things in a new way, both of which practices will lead him further and...