SOURCE: "Elinor Wylie: The Glass Chimera and the Minotaur," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 12, No. 1, April, 1966, pp. 15-26.

In the following excerpt Wright groups Wylie's poems by their imagery and links the images to Wylie's personality.

The poet-novelist Elinor Wylie (1885-1928) shows a marked preference for certain imagery: she loves figurines and other beautiful objects made from gems, porcelain, ivory, Venetian glass, and especially crystal, her symbol of purity. Her fondness for these treasures has affected—perhaps distorted—not only her literary reputation, but the world's image of her personality.

The essay "Jewelled Bindings" (1923) states her artistic credo in terms of this predilection. She likens most contemporary poets, including herself, to "careful lapidaries," all busy inlaying their work with moonstones and blue chalcedonies; they work "in metal and glass, in substances hard and brittle." For a minor poet, she reasons, this tendency is preferable to being "soft and...