When Elinor Wylie died in 1928 at the age of 43, she had built a considerable reputation as both a poet and a novelist. She was a voracious reader who idealized Shelley. Her own work is reminiscent of Dante, Webster, and Aesthetic Decadents of the late nineteenth century. It is deceptively simple, couched in traditional rhyme schemes. But it is sharply pointed and sensitive. Edmund Wilson described her as "the master of a divine language."