SOURCE: Elinor Wylie: A Life Apart, a Biography, Dial Press, 1979,376 p.

Olson is a biographer whose work includes studies of John Singer Sargent. In the following excerpt from his biography of Wylie, Olson provides information about Wylie's life as it informs the themes of her major books of poetry.

Unlike Lord Byron and Lytton Strachey, Elinor did not wake up one October morning in 1921 to find herself famous. The recognition she received for Nets to Catch the Wind was of a more somber variety, and very long in coming…. When critics opened [the book], they found a great deal to arrest them. The most captivating things were the certainty and the angular emotions of the poems. Phrases like Louis Untermeyer's "sparkle without burning," "frigid ecstasy," "passion frozen at its source," became critics and reader's leitmotifs in describing her work. She seemed capable of combining stunning craftsmanship with ethereal...