Elinor Wylie, born Elinor Morton Hoyt on 7 September 1885 in Somerville, New Jersey, belonged to an American generation that inherited Victorian social codes yet came of age amid modernism, women’s expanding public ambitions, war, cosmopolitan travel, and changing ideas of artistic freedom. She would become known as one of the most distinctive lyric poets of the 1920s: a writer of polished, compressed, often formally…
“I say it is meringue, but you will see it is really meringue flavoured with strychnine rather than vanilla bean.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Confessional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Irony, Joy
1 live poem · Old English
Ealhswith of Mercia, conventionally assigned the dates c. 920–c. 970, cannot responsibly be presented as a historical poet. No surviving charter, chronicle, genealogy, monastic record, manuscript inscription, or near-contemporary literary testimony identifies a woman of that name as the author of The Wife’s Lament or of any other Old English poem. The name “Ealhswith of Mercia,” together with the narrative of an exil…
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Medieval Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Longing
