SOURCE: "The Pattern of the Atmosphere," in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Vol. XI, No. V, August 1932, pp. 273-82.

In the following excerpt from a review of The Collected Poems of Elinor Wylie, Zabel faults Wylie's work, assessing it as repetitive and ineffectively ornate.

Mrs. Elinor Wylie was a poet of late development but of enviable successes. By the testimony of every acquaintance, the graces exhibited in her verse are corroborated in her actual life. An agile wit was the factor which propelled her from charm to charm in her choice of materials: from historic themes of the most ingenious fragility and inaccessibility, to familiar encounters rendered desirable by the humor and elegance of imagination she brought to them. Thus seventeenth-century Venice had no riches to strike envy in the heart of a pioneer farmer on the Chesapeake: for each of them she conjured an experience of equal...