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Elinor Wylie |
Like a character dreamed up by her beloved Shelley, Elinor Wylie lived her life to its fragile, self-indulgent limits. She married right out of high school and then divorced the man four years later, leaving her little son behind. With Horace Wylie, a Washington lawyer seventeen years her senior, she escaped to England, her reputation in dramatic shambles.
But as Europe stumbled into war, she returned to America in 1916 and met William Rose Benét. Her first book, Nets to Catch the Wind, was published in 1921 to great success. Over the next seven years she married Benét and wrote three more books of poetry as well as four novels. But she was enthralled with Shelley, saw visions of him, began to relive his life day to day, and started writing as if her life was destined to be short. She was diagnosed with a chronic kidney disease, and in 1928, after escaping to England (again) and falling in love (again), she came home and died of a stroke correcting the proofs of her last book.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |