Elinor Wylie



Elinor Morton Wylie (7 September 1885 – 16 December 1928) was an American poet and novelist popular in the 1920s and 1930s.

Quotes


My soul was born.''' Under thorn, oak and ash My body bent to the lash.
 * '''Under oak, ash and thorn
 * "Beltane", published in Last Poems of Elinor Wylie (1943)

Nets to Catch the Wind (1921)

 * Full text online at Project Gutenberg

Wild Peaches

 * Full text online at Poetry Foundation

You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore'''; We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town, You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color. Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor, We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown.
 * '''When the world turns completely upside down
 * 1

The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot, Tasting of cider and of scuppernong; All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all. The squirrels in their silver fur will fall Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot.
 * The winter will be short, the summer long,
 * 1

Blue plums lie open to the blackbird’s beak, We shall live well — we shall live very well.
 * When strawberries go begging, and the sleek
 * 3

There’s something in this richness that I hate.''' I love the look, austere, immaculate, Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones. There’s something in my very blood that owns Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate, A thread of water, churned to milky spate Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.
 * '''Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones
 * 4

Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves; That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath, Summer, so much too beautiful to stay, Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves, And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.'''
 * '''I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray,
 * 4

A Crowded Trolley Car

 * Full text online at Poetry Foundation

Sharp as golden sands, '''A bell is clanging, people sway Hanging by their hands.'''
 * The rain’s cold grains are silver-gray

Hanging from the skies; '''Brothers, yet insensate brutes Who fear each others’ eyes.'''
 * Orchard of the strangest fruits

As if his soul might be Brave, unbroken; see his hand Nailed to an oaken tree.'''
 * '''One man stands as free men stand

Quotes about Elinor Wylie

 * Wylie and Millay were standard in high school-women whom I really loved. Eliot. That man used to put me on fire with his words.
 * 1978 interview in Conversations with Audre Lorde (2004)


 * It is not in the power of an organization which has insulted Elinor Wylie, to honour me.
 * Edna St. Vincent Millay 4/18/1927 letter to the League of American Penwomen, anthologized in Letters of a Nation: A Collection of Extraordinary American Letters edited by Andrew Carroll