SOURCE: "Women as Humans, as Lovers, as Artists," in A History of American Poetry: Our Singing Strength, Tudor Publishing Company, 1934, pp. 438-65.

In the following excerpt from his book of historical criticism, Kreymborg discusses the pessimism in some of Wylie's poems.

The despair and disillusionment setting in after the World War found its most tragic voice abroad in T. S. Eliot. On this side the Atlantic, it found a feminine counterpart in the marvelous brain of Elinor Wylie. Her work was not a direct reaction to the aftermath, but was raised on the private life of an aristocratic nature in no wise akin with the mob or democracy. Among the new aristocracy of intellects rearing ivory towers out of independent domiciles, Eliot was the prince, Elinor Wylie the princess. Each has had a long line of retainers and imitators. The despair of the woman was a positive thing...