Poetry
Nets to Catch the Wind
Elinor Wylie · 1921
Synopsis
Thirty-two short pieces in closed forms, eight sonnets and rhymed stanzas, in which metals, stones and jewels recur. Beauty there has the hard heart of a child; the eagle is set against the mole that lives underground among the roots; a goldsmith fairy fashions jewels that fall to dust outside her kingdom; one walks in the snow in velvet shoes. A sequence of four sonnets dreams of an exile on a shore of the Chesapeake where peach trees grow wild.
Context
The volume was published by Harcourt, Brace in 1921; until then its author had had printed only a slim anonymous pamphlet, in London, in 1912. Several pieces had appeared in magazines, including Velvet Shoes in Poetry in May 1920. The book made her famous at once: Edna St. Vincent Millay and Louis Untermeyer praised it, and it received the Julia Ellsworth Ford Prize of the Poetry Society of America. Her reputation declined in the middle of the century, before feminist criticism reread her from the 1980s onwards.
Who it is for
A short collection, in regular forms, to be taken piece by piece. No French translation.
Prizes and reception
The collection that established her at a stroke, often considered by critics to be her best book.
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