Elinor Wylie: The Glass Chimaera and the Minotaur

Abstract

The poet-novelist Elinor Wylie (1885-1928) shows marked preference for certain imagery: she loves figurines and other beautiful objects made from gems, porcelain, ivory, Venetian glass, and especially crystal, her symbol of purity. Her fondness for these treasures has affected --perhaps distorted--not only her literary reputation, but the world's image of her personality. The essay Jewelled Bindings (1923) states her artistic credo terms of this predilection. She likens most contemporary poets, including herself, to careful lapidaries, all busy inlaying their work with moonstones and blue chalcedonies; they Work in metal and glass, substances hard and brittle. For minor poet, she reasons, this tendency preferable to being soft and opulently luscious. She and her confreres, cultivating a small clean technique, contrive each poem like musical snuff-box: two or three polished stanzas make a small jewelled receptacle for gilded bird. Our work, she adds, is notoriously brittle, and I have no fear that its forms will ever imprison an authentic genius. If she dared suspect that her own bird was live eagle or nightingale, she would let him out of the snuff-box. A writer, like any other person, accepted largely upon his own estimate of himself. With Jewelled Bindings efore him, critic might be disposed to see Elinor Wylie as a hard, jewellike nature, [which] reflected the world coldly and glitteringly, as if all were snow and ice, metallic and gleaming; her artistry as a sword, intricately carved, magnificently polished, and terribly effective; her woman's form as cold, though within it burned high, proud heart, and rebellious spirit beat itself into concentrated and exquisitely finished poetry. This account of her, drawing somewhat upon Louis Untermeyer's Modern American Poetry (1925), appeared widely adopted textbook, Contemporary American Literature (1929), by John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert. Subsequent critics have tended to use the same adjectives. But even reader without preconceptions will soon see for himself that