“I am better able to imagine hell than heaven; it is my inheritance, I suppose.” — poet Elinor Wylie

She was born on this day.

I am not familiar with the full scope of Elinor Wylie’s work, but what I do know really strikes my fancy. I wonder if A.S. Byatt used Wylie’s poetry as some of the inspiration for the poems Christabel Lamotte writes in Possession.

Unlike the other free verse modernists of the day, Wylie liked structure and form. She was also a novelist, and famous in her own lifetime, cagey about her earlier published work. She seems to have had a mixture of incredible shyness and total openness. She kept working, kept publishing. Her novels were very successful. She did not live a long life.

Wylie experienced many scandals, which probably took up a lot of her time and energy: She left her first husband and their child – !! – to elope with another man (who was also married). Wylie is often compared to Edna St. Vincent Millay, I hope not just because they are both women. But they did flout social conventions to an extreme extent. There are artistic similarities. Millay did not experiment with free verse. She kept to the old forms. So did Wylie. This was probably why Wylie was more popular in her own lifetime than some of the more trailblazing poets who left a deeper mark on the culture and are still studied in universities the world over.

Not as well-known now as her contemporaries, she is well worth a look if you haven’t read her before.

I love Wylie’s poem “Incantation”. It calls to mind the lesbian poet of A.S. Byatt’s great novel Possession: the short little lines (which also call to mind Sylvia Plath’s later poems – “Lady Lazarus”, “Daddy”, “Fever 103” – they all have that short box-like structure, each line about 3 or 4 words long – it’s chilling even just to look at. It makes the poem look breathless.

I also love how the title of Wylie’s poem actually describes what she attempts in the poem, and she does it through image.

Incantation

A white well
In a black cave;
A bright shell
In a dark wave.

A white rose
Black brambles hood;
Smooth bright snows
In a dark wood.

A flung white glove
In a dark fight;
A white dove
On a wild black night.

A white door
In a dark lane;
A bright core
To bitter black pain.

A white hand
Waved from dark walls;
In a burnt black land
Bright waterfalls.

A bright spark
Where black ashes are;
In the smothering dark
One white star.

Rebecca West, answering a letter requesting information about Wylie:

2 November 1953
To: Nancy Potter

Dear Miss Potter,

So far as I know I have no letters from Elinor Wylie. We had a steady friendship, which was renewed every time we met at exactly the point where it had been when we had last met, and we rarely wrote except to confirm a date or give a friend’s address. My files are in great disorder, owing to the war and to post-war irregularities, and I can’t be sure. But I really don’t think I can have anything that would interest you.

During her last trip to England she made no comment to me that indicated that she was specially annoyed with anything but the fact that she had fallen downstairs, or that she was frustrated with anything but the fact that she could not get about as much as usual. You are on very sound ground when you say that “she often appeared to be playing frantically with life to make each year count.” I don’t really believe, however, that people are right when they lay stress on this as an indication of a neurosis. I am sure that her conduct was largely dictated by her appallingly high blood-pressure. She must, for years and years, have been feeling quite dreadfully ill, and was racing to get away from her own discomfort.

I know she was an egotist. But so are most people who achieve a great deal, or rather who push their achievement above a certain level. It often seemed to me that when other people called her egotistical when she was being honest – she was exceptionally beautiful, she was exceptionally gifted, and it would have been stupid of her not to have known this. Her self-knowledge was expressed often in febrile terms, but really she had enough blood-pressure to make this understandable. It seems to me that it would be dangerous to consider Elinor Wylie without taking into account the extraordinary spitefulness of the age in which she lived. Looking back at it, the world seems to me to have been overfull of people who spent their lives saying, “We went to the Smith’s party last night – it was just terrible,” or “Have you met Freda Jones, we met her last night – she is just terrible,” with a screech on the terrible that I recognized during the war in the wail of the air-raid sirens. The gentler and more civilised the Smiths or Freda Brown might be the more the screech. Elinor Wylie was the chosen victim of the screechers. I daresay she often behaved tiresomely. But twice it happened to me that I was at a party with Elinor where she was gay and funny and brilliant, and that a few nights later I went to a cocktail party where people who had not been at that party described the ludicrous remarks Elinor had made at it and what a nuisance she had been.

She had an enormous sense of duty. It hurt her tremendously that she had failed in her duties as a step-mother; and of course she had failed, she was as unsuited to be a step-mother as any romantic character would be. She seemed to me to be often arrogant in her judgment of other people, but arrogant only in the sense that she dismissed people for lacking certain qualities before she had looked round to see if they had any other qualities; when those other qualities hit her in the eye she was just and humble. Once she met a friend of mine at my room in the old Majestic and spoke of her afterwards with candid contempt, wondering why I cared for this woman. I arranged for them to meet again, under better circumstances, as the woman adored Elinor’s work and wanted to ask her permission to do something with one of her poems; and she got on to her character this time, and rang me up and admitted her error very handsomely (Not because she knew the woman wanted to do something with one of her poems – the woman hadn’t then mentioned it). And though she was arrogant I don’t remember her ever being spiteful. I should have been very much surprised indeed if she had ever repeated to me a story about anybody which was even slanted, and I could not have believed it if anybody had ever accused Elinor of inventing a story against anybody, though that was the vice of the time. As you know, she had a very uneasy relationship (this is an example of British understatement) with Kathleen Norris. She always spoke of her, even in her most confidential moments, with reserve, with a well-bred blankness.

You know, of course, the incident that touched off the explosion in her early life, when she left her first husband and her child. I haven’t any reason to disbelieve it, but I have no authority but Elinor’s own statement, which however she repeated to me several times. She always repeated it in the same form, though many other items in the context in which this story was embedded varied considerably. Apparently, after her father died, it was discovered that he had been in love with a woman who was not his wife, over a period of many years. Elinor described the scene of this discovery with deep feeling, and always expected me to take it for granted that when you found that your father had been in love with someone not your mother, why, of course, you left your own husband, you just had to, you were so upset. The thing came up as strong and clear as a Racine play. Quite beyond argument. It was something she could no more help than her blood-pressure.

The wonderful thing about Elinor, which none of you who did not know her will ever realise, was her astonishing beauty; which was as significant, as much of a bridge beyond the real and the imaginary world, as the beauty of Rosamund Lehmann. I don’t suppose she had anything to give that had a higher value than that, it was sublime; and to me it appeared not at all a sexual beauty, it made not a heterosexual or homosexual appeal, it made an imaginative appeal. About her relationships – I don’t know enough about them. But I fancy you would find that the people who knew her best liked her best, that her apparent victims would always speak of her with tenderness and affection.

I hear people speaking and writing of her in a patronising spirit. I must own that I found it delightful to know her, and thought and think that she did me considerable honour by wanting to know me.

I hope you have a happy time with your study, and I wish you could have received a letter from me saying, “Yes, indeed, I have a correspondence with Elinor Wylie rather larger in bulk than the Holmes-Laski letters.” But, alas, I have always had too many family ties to get on with my writing or my letter-writing as I would have wished.

Yours sincerely,

Rebecca West

To Elinor Wylie
(In answer to a question about her)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Oh, she was beautiful in every part! —
The auburn hair that bound the subtle brain;
The lovely mouth cut clear by wit and pain,
Uttering oaths and nonsense, uttering art
In casual speech and curving at the smart
On startled ears of excellence too plain
For early morning! — Obit. Death from strain;
The soaring mind outstripped the tethered heart.
Yet here was one who had no need to die
To be remembered. Every word she said,
The lively malice of the hazel eye
Scanning the thumb-nail close — oh, dazzling dead,
How like a comet through the darkening sky
You raced! … would your return were heralded.

Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Elinor Wylie, who entered New York’s vibrant literary scene in 1921, wrote rhyming poetry nourished by the examples of Shelley and Keats, but at her best she countervails Romantic opulence with an austerity comparable to Imagism.

Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language:

Elinor Wylie was obsessed with Shelley, whose influence is manifest in much of her poetry, and in her novel, The Orphan Angel (1926).

Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language:

At her best, [she is] brimming with life and love, celebrating a natural sweetness and abundance.

 
 
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