SOURCE: "1900-1945: A Rose Is a Rose with Thorns," in The Poetry Of American Women from 1632 to 1945, University of Texas Press, 1977, pp. 149-76.

In the following excerpt from her book of feminist criticism, Watts compares Wylie to other female poets, including Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Millay and Wylie were good friends, and their poetry is often considered together as "female Lyrist," apparently a new twentieth-century category of poetry which has been conceived especially for women poets such as Millay, Wylie, [Sara] Teasdale, [Lizette] Reese, and others…. Actually, the term Lyrist itself is a catchall and condescending critical term which is a development from the concept of "female poetry" of the nineteenth century. Moreover, the generalization which this term demands is wrong. Sara Teasdale is not Lizette Woodworth Reese is not Elinor Wylie is certainly not Edna St. Vincent Millay. Actually, of all these women...