SOURCE: The Prose and Poetry of Elinor Wylie, Wheaton College Press, 1934, 24 p.

In the following excerpt from the Annie Talbot Cole Lecture of Wheaton College, Benét describes his late wife as a "great poet," possessed of a natural talent and love of the English language.

I contend that [Elinor Wylie] was a great prose writer because she was a great poet. What then is a poet such as she? Such poets have puzzled fine minds through the ages for definition of the quality of their work. For one thing, she was born to welcome the most intensely arduous mental labour in passionate exploration of the utmost resources of the English language in order to express every finest shade of thought and feeling that she experienced. She was abnormally sensitive to the powers latent in language. She had an altogether unusual intuition for the exact word, and had...