Wylie valued self-fulfillment over the dictates of society, but she knew the cost of doing so. Her first book of poems (Incidental Numbers, privately printed in 1911) includes a poem “Eve in Heaven” dated four months after Elinor and Horace ran off together. Shunned by angels, scorned by saints, and decried by the damned for her sin of sexual love, Eve does not finch but smiles. She pities the Virgin Mary who “was never there…poor soul!”

            Wylie wrote of hard-won strength. In “Let No Charitable Hope” (Black Armour, 1923), we are told:  

            I was, being human, born alone;

            I am, being woman, hard beset;

            I live by squeezing from a stone

            The little nourishment I get. Solitary and beleaguered by restrictions placed upon her gender, this speaker takes what she needs from life. The poem closes with another wry and fearless smile.

Larsen, Jeanne. “Lowell, Teasdale, Wylie, Millay, and Bogan.” The Columbia History of American Poetry. Ed. Jay Parini. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 216-217.