Elinor Morton Hoyt Wylie Benét
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Elinor Wylie
"Avoid the reeking herd, / Shun the polluted flock, / Live like that stoic bird, / The eagle of the rock."
"The Eagle and the Mole," Nets to Catch the Wind (1921)
"I was, being human, born alone; / I am, being woman, hard beset; / I live by squeezing from a stone / The little nourishment I get. / In masks outrageous and austere / The years go by in single file; / But none has merited my fear, / And none has quite escaped my smile."
"Let No Charitable Hope," Nets to Catch the Wind (1921)"The months between the cherries and the peaches / Are brimming cornucopias which spill / Fruits red and purple ... "
"Wild Peaches," Nets to Catch the Wind (1921)"I have never cared very deeply about the actual taste of my work. Let its essential odor satisfy my mind and senses, and I am content. I rarely judge by the grosser test of actual gustation ... in cooking, to create a masterpiece for the nose alone -- that is exquisite, that is Art!"
Jennifer Lorn (1923)"An old earthen pipe like myself is dry and thirsty and so a most voracious drinker of life at its source; I'm no more to be split by the vital stream than if I were stone or steel."
Jennifer Lorn (1923)"His hunger was a pungent sauce which made possible a very fair play of knife and fork ... "
The Orphan Angel (1926)"You're a pretty one to talk about language now; you could be took up anywhere and jailed for most of the verbs you uses in an hour."
The Orphan Angel (1926)"Moonstruck, sunstruck, starstruck, and struck by the blue lightning of his glance ... "
The Orphan Angel (1926)"... I am better able to imagine hell than heaven; it is my Puritan inheritance, I suppose."
The Orphan Angel (1926)" He was dizzy with conflict; he had two souls, and not to save them both could he have disentangled the soul of light from the soul of shadow."
The Orphan Angel (1926)"The worst and best are both inclined / To snap like vixens at the truth; / But, O, beware the middle mind / That purrs and never shows a tooth!"
"Nonsense Rhyme," Angels and Earthly Creatures (1929)"A pinch of fair, a pinch of foul. / And bad and good makes best of all; / Beware the moderated soul / That climbs no fractional inch to fall."
"Nonsense Rhyme," Angels and Earthly Creatures (1929)"I love smooth words, like gold-enameled fish / Which circle slowly with a silken swish ... "
"Pretty Words," in William Rose Benét, ed., Collected Poems of Elinor Wylie (1932)"Words shy and dappled, deep-eyed deer in herds, / Come to my hand, and playful if I wish ... "
"Pretty Words," in William Rose Benét, ed., Collected Poems of Elinor Wylie (1932)"... honeyed words like bees, / Gilded and sticky, with a little sting."
"Pretty Words," in William Rose Benét, ed., Collected Poems of Elinor Wylie (1932)"If any have a stone to throw / It is not I, ever or now."
"The Pebble," in William Rose Benét, ed., Collected Poems of Elinor Wylie (1932)