SOURCE: "Debut as Aesthete," in The Life and Art of Elinor Wylie, Louisiana State University Press, 1983, pp. 58-83.

In the following excerpt from her full-length critical study of Wylie's poetry and prose, Farr analyzes poems from Incidental Numbers and Nets to Catch the Wind.

Incidental Numbers, a small collection of verses composed between 1902 and 1911, was Elinor Wylie's first book of poems. Privately printed in England, in an edition of only about sixty copies, the book's pale blue binding and navy lettering imitated an edition of Blake's Songs of Innocence. Copies were presented as gifts to Elinor's family and acquaintances. Her mother paid the publication costs. When Incidental Numbers appeared, Elinor was twenty-seven years old and living out of wedlock with Horace Wylie in Burley, England. The scandal created by her elopement had cost her her social position in America; her former friends were "convinced that she was done...