[In the following excerpt from his collection of critical essays, Southworth faults Wylie's poetry, suggesting that it lacks the necessary quality that would enable it to maintain the status of exceptional literature over time.]

Miss Elinor Wylie has been favoured with a good "press" and she has often been spoken of as one of America's great women poets…. [Although] I can admire some fifteen of her poems, I do not think Time will continue to do what her late husband and his and her friends with ready access to the public's ear were so able to do for her. The poems on which her reputation will rest are early as well as late, serious, humorous, and ironic, and are confined to no one subject. Taken in order from her Collected Poems, they are "Velvet Shoes," "Let No Charitable Hope," "Cold-Blooded Creatures," "Love Song," "The little beauty that I was allowed," "I have believed that I prefer to live," "Little Elegy," "Pretty Words," "Viennese Waltz," "Golden Bough," and "A Tear for Cressid." Not all of these are of the same quality and I think none of them ranks with the truly great lyrics in our heritage of English literature….

[Miss Wylie] has a tendency to over-emphasize her state…. Particularly is she apt to overstress her ability to make a synthesis out of refractory materials and to over-estimate the precision of her mind.

Death is important in her poetry, particularly as a release of the soul from the prison of the body, a release often intimately bound up with love. But it is her treatment of love that will most appeal to the majority of her readers. Her approach is what Mr. [John Crowe] Ransom calls the "heart's desire" approach, and it reaches its greatest intensity in the sonnet sequence from Section One of Angels and Earthly Creatures, known as "One Person." Although the reader will not question the intensity of the emotion, he may well question the artistry with which she expresses that emotion. At no time is the precision of her mind more open to question than in her treatment of details. Extravagance and confusion are often present…. Personally, I have always found it difficult to understand why lovers could not be friends, but Miss Wylie, being extremely feminine in her whole approach to life, believes that it is impossible, and is explicit on the subject on several occasions. Her love poems, in spite of their imperfections (or because of them) will appeal to the same readers as does Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How do I love thee," for which I have never greatly cared.

Certain weaknesses of Miss Wylie are obvious; others call for attention. Quite obvious, for example, is the fact that she is incapable of sustained flight. In "Miranda's Supper," she not only fails with the poem as a whole, but the rhyme word often dictates the thought and some of the rhymes are inexcusable. Even in a shorter poem, such as "Wild Peaches," the thought is often dictated by the rhyme rather than the reverse, as, quite obviously, it should be. Bad rhymes occur frequently throughout her poetry. At times Miss Wylie's rhythms, never anything but traditional, are too facile, as in "Silver Filigree" and some of her ocrosyllabics, always a dangerous measure.

My greatest quarrel is with the details of many of the poems. As pleasant as is "Velvet Shoes," for example, I find "White as a white cow's milk" a little silly. I never thought the whiteness of the cow affected the colour of the milk. In "Sequence," which I confess I find confusing in general, I think her statement that a man might find her skeleton and bury it to "circumvent the wolf attributes to the wolf an interest in dry bones that he probably does not possess. Were these … isolated cases, I should not call attention to them, but such weaknesses flaw poem after poem.

It would be unfair to Miss Wylie, however, not to make some amends…. ["Little Elegy"] and "Velvet Shoes" will certainly be long remembered. In these two the rhythms are more distinctively her own. Elsewhere the music is strongly derivative. There are obvious echoes of Shakespeare. Shelley, and Keats, with an occasional echo of A. E. Housman and Emily Dickinson. Because her rhythms exact no effort from the reader before her music can be enjoyed—it being obvious rather than subtle and delicately modulated—she must pay the penalty of being sooner passed by. Max Friedlander, the great art critic, has remarked that a truly great work will repel before it begins to attract…. Miss Wylie's poetry begins by attracting.