Elinor Wylie facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Elinor Wylie
|
|
|---|---|
Elinor Wylie
|
|
| Born | Elinor Morton Hoyt September 7, 1885 Somerville, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Died | December 16, 1928 (aged 43) New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | Writer, editor |
| Language | English |
| Notable works | Nets to Catch the Wind, Black Armor, Angels and Earthly Creatures |
| Notable awards | Julia Ellsworth Ford Prize |
| Spouse |
Philip Simmons Hichborn
(m. 1906; died 1912)Horace Wylie (m. 1916–19??) William Rose Benét
(m. 1923) |
| Children | Philip Simmons Hichborn, Jr. |
Elinor Morton Wylie (September 7, 1885 – December 16, 1928) was an American poet and novelist popular in the 1920s and 1930s. "She was famous during her life almost as much for her ethereal beauty and personality as for her melodious, sensuous poetry."
Life
Family and childhood
Elinor Wylie was born Elinor Morton Hoyt in Somerville, New Jersey, into a socially prominent family. Her grandfather, Henry M. Hoyt, was a governor of Pennsylvania. Her parents were Henry Martyn Hoyt, Jr., who would be United States Solicitor General from 1903 to 1909; and Anne Morton McMichael (born July 31, 1861 in Pa.). Their other children were:
- Henry Martyn Hoyt III (1887–1920), an artist who married Alice Gordon Parker.
- Constance Hoyt (1889–1923) who married Ferdinand von Stumm-Halberg on March 30, 1910, in Washington, D.C.
- Morton McMichael Hoyt (1899-1949), three times married and divorced Eugenia Bankhead, known as "Sister" and sister of Tallulah Bankhead
- Nancy McMichael Hoyt (1902-1949), a romance novelist who wrote Elinor Wylie: The Portrait of an Unknown Woman (1935). She married Edward Davison Curtis; they divorced in 1932.
In 1887, the Hoyt family moved to Rosemont, a suburb of Philadelphia.
Because of her father's political aspirations, Elinor spent much of her youth in Washington, DC. She was educated at Miss Baldwin's School (1893–97), Mrs. Flint's School (1897–1901), and finally Holton-Arms School (1901–04). In particular, from age 12 to 20, she lived in Washington again where she made her debut in the midst of the "city's most prominent social élite," being "trained for the life of a debutante and a society wife".
Career
Elinor Wylie's literary friends encouraged her to submit her verse to Poetry magazine. Poetry published four of her poems, including what became "her most widely anthologized poem, 'Velvet Shoes'", in May 1920. With Benét now acting as her informal literary agent, "Wylie left her second husband and moved to New York in 1921". The Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB) says: "She captivated the literary world with her slender, tawny-haired beauty, personal elegance, acid wit, and technical virtuosity."
In 1921, Wylie's first commercial book of poetry, Nets to Catch the Wind, was published. The book, "which many critics still consider to contain her best poems," was an immediate success. Edna St. Vincent Millay and Louis Untermeyer praised the work. The Poetry Society awarded her its Julia Ellsworth Ford Prize.
In 1923 she published Black Armor, which was "another successful volume of verse". The New York Times enthused: "There is not a misplaced word or cadence in it. There is not an extra syllable."
1923 also saw the publication of Wylie's first novel, Jennifer Lorn, to considerable fanfare. Van Vechten "organized a torchlight parade through Manhattan to celebrate its publication".
According to Carl Van Doren, Wylie had "as sure and strong an intelligence" as he has ever known. Her novels were "flowers with roots reaching down into unguessed deeps of erudition."
She worked as the poetry editor of Vanity Fair magazine between 1923 and 1925. She was an editor of Literary Guild, and a contributing editor of The New Republic, from 1926 through 1928.
Wylie was an "admirer of the British Romantic poets, and particularly of Shelley, to a degree that some critics have seen as abnormal". She wrote a 1926 novel, The Orphan Angel, in which "the great young poet is rescued from drowning off an Italian cape and travels to America, where he encounters the dangers of the frontier."
By the time of Wylie's third book of poetry, Trivial Breath in 1928, her marriage with Benét was also in trouble, and they had agreed to live apart. She moved to England and fell in love with the husband of a friend, Henry de Clifford Woodhouse, to whom she wrote a series of 19 sonnets which she published privately in 1928 as Angels and Earthly Creatures (also included in her 1929 book of the same name).
Elinor Wylie's literary output is impressive, given that her writing career lasted just eight years. In that brief period, she crowded four volumes of poems, four novels, and enough magazine articles to "make up an additional volume."
Death
Wylie suffered from very high blood pressure all her adult life. As a result, she was prone to unbearable migraines and died of a stroke at Benét's New York apartment at the age of forty-three. At the time, they were both preparing for publication her Angels and Earthly Creatures.
Writing
Poetry
Wylie's "highly polished, articulate, and deeply emotional verse shows the influence of the metaphysical poets," such as John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. If her poetry is derivative of anyone, though, that would be "of the British Romantic poets, and particularly of Shelley," whom she admired "to a degree that some critics have seen as abnormal."
In her first book, Nets to Catch the Wind, "Stanzas and lines were quite short, and the effect of her images was of a highly detailed, polished surface. Often, her poems expressed a dissatisfaction with the realities of life on the part of a speaker who aspired to a more gratifying world of art and beauty." Louis Untermeyer wrote that the book "impresses immediately because of its brilliance ... which, at first, seems to sparkle without burning.... It is the brilliance of moon-light corruscating on a plain of ice. But if Mis. Wylie seldom allows her verses to grow agitated, she never permits them to remain dull.... in 'August' the sense of heat is conveyed by tropic luxuriance and contrast; in 'The Eagle and the Mole' she lifts didacticism to a proud level ... never has snow-silence been more unerringly communicated than in 'Velvet Shoes.'" Other notable poems include "Wild Peaches," "A Proud Lady," "Sanctuary," "Winter Sleep," "Madman's Song," "The Church-Bell," and "A Crowded Trolley Car."
In Black Armor (1923), "the intellect has grown more fiery, the mood has grown warmer, and the craftsmanship is more dazzling than ever.... she varies the perfect modulation with rhymes that are delightfully acrid and unique departures which never fail of success ... from the nimble dexterity of a rondo like 'Peregrine' to the introspective poignance of 'Self Portrait,' from the fanciful 'Escape' to the grave mockery of 'Let No Charitable Hope.'"
Trivial Breath (1928) "is the work of a poet in transition. At times the craftsman is uppermost; at times the creative genius."
Wylie's biographer Stanley Olson called the sonnets that begin 1929's Angels and Earthly Creatures "perhaps, her finest achievement.... The love in these lyrics is not a private love, not a variety of confession, but an abstracted one.... The nineteen sonnets are paced with strength, energy and undeniable feeling, sustained as a group by shifting through the complexities and vicissitudes of love." Untermeyer also praised the sonnets, but added: "The other poems share this intensity. 'This Corruptible' is both visionary and philosophic; 'O Virtuous Light' deals with that piercing clarity, the intuition ... The other poems are scarcely less uplifted, finding their summit in 'Hymn to Earth, which is one of her deeper poems and one which is certain to endure."
Fiction
Wylie's four novels "are delicately wrought and filled with ironic fancy".
See also
In Spanish: Elinor Wylie para niños
