SOURCE: "Elinor Wylie," in Poets & Their Art, Macmillan, 1932, pp. 106-13.

Monroe was a famous poet and the editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. In the following excerpt, she praises Wylie's poetic skills and ability to capture the essence of passion and spirit in her poems.

Though Elinor Wylie died at forty-two, in a sense her work was complete, was finished. She had perfected her style and delivered her message. Death merely rounded the circle, gave her career a wholeness, a symmetry, as when a thorough-bred racer wins a trophy at the goal which was his starting-point a few minutes before.

Her first poems, like the racer's first paces, were of an instinctive yet trained precision; there was no fumbling or halting, never a stumble or a false step. To be sure, she began later than most poets, never discovering her literary gift until she was well past...