For, A Look Into Lesser Known Poets, A Series, ( 4th.) Poet, Elinor Wylie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Wylie
Elinor Wylie
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 Benet
(m. 1923; died 1950)
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."[1]
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 aunt was Helen Hoyt, a poet.[2] 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 (May 8, 1887, in Pa. – August 25, 1920 in New York City) who married Alice Gordon Parker (1885–1951)
Constance A. Hoyt (May 20, 1889, in Pa. – 1923 in Bavaria, Germany) who married Ferdinand von Stumm-Halberg on March 30, 1910, in Washington, D.C.
Morton McMichael Hoyt (April 4, 1899, in Washington, D.C. - August 21, 1949, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), three times married and divorced Eugenia Bankhead, known as "Sister" and sister of Tallulah Bankhead
Nancy McMichael Hoyt (born October 1, 1902, in Washington, D.C. - 1949) romance novelist who wrote Elinor Wylie: The Portrait of an Unknown Woman (1935). She married Edward Davison Curtis; they divorced in 1932.
Because of her father's political aspirations, Elinor spent much of her youth in Washington, DC.[3] She was educated at Miss Baldwin's School (1893–97), Mrs. Flint's School (1897–1901), and finally Holton-Arms School (1901–04).[4][failed verification] 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,"[3] being "trained for the life of a debutante and a society wife".[5]
"As a girl she was already bookish—not in the languid or inactive sense but girded, embraced by books, between whose covers lay the word-perfect world she sought. She grew into a tall, dark beauty in the classic 1920s style. Some who knew her claimed she was the most striking woman they ever met."[6]
Marriages and scandal
After Elinor eloped with Horace Wylie, Philip Simmons Hichborn committed suicide in this building.
The future Elinor Wylie became notorious, during her lifetime, for her multiple affairs and marriages. On the rebound from an earlier romance she met her first husband, Harvard graduate Philip Simmons Hichborn[5] (1882–1912), the son of a rear-admiral. She eloped with him and they were married on December 13, 1906, when she was 20. She had a son by him, Philip Simmons Hichborn, Jr., born September 22, 1907 in Washington, D.C. However, "Hichborn, a would-be poet, was emotionally unstable",[5] and Elinor found herself in an unhappy marriage.
She also found herself being stalked by Horace Wylie, "a Washington lawyer with a wife and three children", who "was 17 years older than Elinor. He stalked her for years, appearing wherever she was."[7]
Following the death in November 1910 of Elinor's father, and unable to secure a divorce from Hichborn,[3] she left her husband and son, and eloped with Wylie.
"After being ostracized by their families and friends and mistreated in the press, the couple moved to England"[8] where they lived "under the assumed name of Waring; this event caused a scandal in the Washington, D.C., social circles Elinor Wylie had frequented".[5] Philip Simmons Hichborn Sr. committed suicide in 1912.
With Horace Wylie's encouragement, in 1912 Elinor anonymously published Incidental Number, a small book of poems she had written in the previous decade.[5]
Between 1914 and 1916, Elinor tried to have a second child, but "suffered several miscarriages ... as well as a stillbirth and ... a premature child who died after one week."[5]
After Horace Wylie's wife agreed to a divorce, the couple returned to the United States and lived in three different states "under the stress of social ostracism and Elinor's illness." Elinor and Horace Wylie officially married in 1916, after Elinor's first husband had committed suicide and Horace's first wife had divorced him. By then, however, the couple were drawing apart."[5]
Elinor began spending time in literary circles in New York City—"her friends there numbered John Peale Bishop, Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Carl Van Vechten, and ... William Rose Benét."[5]
Her last marriage (in 1923)[9] was to William Rose Benét (February 2, 1886 – May 4, 1950), who was part of her literary circle and brother of Stephen Vincent Benét. By the time Wylie's third book of poetry, Trivial Breath in 1928 appeared, 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).[8]
Career
Vanity Fair magazine (cover by John Held, Jr.), where Wylie worked 1923-1925
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,[5] "Wylie left her second husband and moved to New York in 1921".[8] 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."[5]
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.[5] The Poetry Society awarded her its Julia Ellsworth Ford Prize.[4]
In 1923 she published Black Armor, which was "another successful volume of verse".[5] The New York Times enthused: "There is not a misplaced word or cadence in it. There is not an extra syllable."[10]
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".[5] She would write "four historical novels widely admired when first published, although interest in them diminished in the masculine era of the 1940s and 50s".[6]
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."[3]
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.[5]
Wylie was an "admirer of the British Romantic poets, and particularly of Shelley, to a degree that some critics have seen as abnormal".[5] "A friend claimed she was 'positively dotty' about Shelley, not just making him her model in art and life but on occasion actually 'seeing' the dead poet."[6] 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."[5]
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).[8]
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."[3]
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.[5]
https://www.poemhunter.com/elinor-morton-wylie/poems/
Elinor Morton Wylie
Five Poems by Elinor Morton Wylie
(1.)
Escape
When foxes eat the last gold grape,
And the last white antelope is killed,
I shall stop fighting and escape
Into a little house I'll build.
But first I'll shrink to fairy size,
With a whisper no one understands,
Making blind moons of all your eyes,
And muddy roads of all your hands.
And you may grope for me in vain
In hollows under the mangrove root,
Or where, in apple-scented rain,
The silver wasp-nests hang like fruit.
Elinor Morton Wylie
(2.)
Fire And Sleet And Candlelight'
For this you've striven
Daring, to fail:
Your sky is riven
Like a tearing veil.
For this, you've wasted
Wings of your youth;
Divined, and tasted
Bitter springs of truth.
From sand unslakèd
Twisted strong cords,
And wandering naked
Among trysted swords.
There's a word unspoken,
A knot untied.
Whatever is broken
The earth may hide.
The road was jagged
Over sharp stones:
Your body's too ragged
To cover your bones.
The wind scatters
Tears upon dust;
Your soul's in tatters
Where the spears thrust.
Elinor Morton Wylie
(3.)
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.
Elinor Morton Wylie
(4.)
Les Lauriers Sont Coupée
Ah, love, within the shadow of the wood
The laurels are cut down; some other brows
May bear the classic wreath which Fame allows
And find the burden honorable and good.
Have we not passed the laurels as they stood--
Soft in the veil with which Spring endows
The wintry glitter of their woven boughs--
Nor stopped to break the branches while we could?
Ah, love, for other brows they are cut down.
Thornless and scentless are their stems and flowers,
And cold as death their twisted coronal.
Sweeter to us the sharpness of this crown;
Sweeter the wildest roses which are ours;
Sweeter the petals, even when they fall.
Elinor Morton Wylie
(5.)
Little Joke - Poem by Elinor Morton Wylie
Stripping an almond tree in flower
The wise apothecary's skill
A single drop of lethal power
From perfect sweetness can distill
From bitterness in efflorescence,
With murderous poisons packed therein;
The poet draws pellucid essence
Pure as a drop of metheglin.
Elinor Morton Wylie
********************
These two poems composed to honor this truly great poet....
(1.)
Heaven Smiles And Its Light Awaits
Icy winds have died, winter fled
Hope has sung, Spring has sprung
Love and promise have wed
new life's radiant glow has brung
music to wake the dead.
Faded are snows that graced the trees
white colors that adorned
forest glens far from seas
Nature's gifts, its dear christened born
cast from Love's seeded pleas.
Icy winds have died, winter fled
Hope has sung, Spring has sprung
Love and promise have wed
new life's radiant glow has brung
music to wake the dead.
As Life and Love, partner with Fate.
Heaven smiles and its Light awaits.
Robert J. Lindley,
Rhyme, Lin 86686 form
( Wherein Life And Spring This Dark Racing World Renews )
Syllables Per Line:8 6 6 8 6 0 8 6 6 8 6 0 8 6 6 8 6 0 8 8
Total # Syllables::118
Total # Words::::::96
Note- Tribute poem composed for fourth poet, ( Elinor Wylie )
in my, -- "Lesser Known Poets Series".
See my new blog on this majestically talented and amazing poet.....
(2.)
From Within Earth's Red Blooms Love Quickly Flew
Of those sweet tender kisses-- I recall
Images that set fiery flames a'leaping
Warming hearts in truest love did swiftly fall
While Cupid through keyhole was a'peeping
From within earth's red blooms love quickly flew
As both yellow moon, twinkling stars did glow
Our eager hearts and eyes meeting we knew
Chained in golden paradise sent to grow,
In romance wedded to be great treasure
Nights of bliss to be our glittering gems
Time setting pure joy well beyond measure
We to become intertwining rose stems,
Flowers shining in garden of true love
Two cast into one, by Heavens above.
Robert J. Lindley,
Sonnet, ( Depths Of Love Those So Truly Blessed Know )
Syllables Per Line:10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10
Total # Syllables::140
Total # Words::::::100
Note-
Tribute poem composed for fourth poet, ( Elinor Wylie )
in my, -- "Lesser Known Poets Series".
See my new blog on this majestically talented and amazing poet...