When Nets to Catch the Wind was published in October 1921, Wylie was unprepared for its enthusiastic reception, both by the poetry-reading public and the critics. Echoes of familiar poets that included Burns, Keats, Dickinson, and Frost pleased her readers. Experimentation in her poetry was not as obvious as that of many of the new poets, and readers felt comfortable with her familiar forms. At the same time her clever language and ironic tone captured the aesthetic sensibilities of the time.        

This early volume demonstrated a mature, fully developed talent that signaled most of the themes and techniques that she offered in her four books of verse. The themes that would dominate all of Wylie’s poetry—escape, martyrdom, narcissism, betrayal, and death—were presented through the fantasy, contrast and contradiction, and irony that helped to create her individual voice. “Velvet Shoes” and “The Eagle and the Mole,” the most widely anthologized of all her poems, strike the keynotes for the entire volume. “Velvet Shoes” is an impressionistic poem, highly visual, and crammed with images. Like “Winter Sleep” and “Silver Filigree” it describes her response to a bitterly cold New England winter and translates that response into an emotional chill. Because these poems are among the most memorable in Nets to Catch the Wind, they may in large measure be responsible for the frequent use by critics of the words icy and frigid to characterize all of Elinor Wylie’s poetry. To most observers her attitude toward the world was indeed as icy as the winter view from her window in Bar Harbor had been.           

“The Eagle and the Mole,” the second poem in the volume, begins: “Avoid the reeking herd / Shun the polluted flock,” and expresses disdain for what is left behind, emphasizing the need for escape. The use of a bird and an animal in the title begins Wylie’s frequent mention of these creatures in her poems; in the thirty-one poems of Nets to Catch the Wind, more than half include animal or bird metaphors. Such allusions were popular in literature of the time. Bill Benét’s poems also were filled with bird and animal images, as Alfred Kreymborg noted in Our Singing Strength. Among those he used are falcons, unicorns, fawns, mustangs, apes, and leviathans—many animals that lend themselves to mythic interpretations. Elinor adopted the animal symbolism along with other poetic devices that Bill manipulated as well. Wylie’s contemporaries recognized the autobiographical reference of “The Eagle and the Mole,” but there is more to the poem than personal revelation. William Butler Yeats, for one, found a “lovely heroic song” that he connected with the movement of the time “toward some heroic discipline.”

Evelyn Helmick Hively. A Private Madness: The Genius of Elinor Wylie. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2003. 52-53.