During her time there as an undergraduate, Viola acquired a particular affinity for poetry and was told by professors that her compositions revealed a "talent for the bizarre.
"[2] She secured a position as a graduate student in English at Radcliffe College (now part of Harvard University) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after receiving her B.A.
Eighteen months later, when the U.S. stock market crashed, ushering in the Great Depression, Wendt and her family were no longer able to afford tuition at Radcliffe, and she was forced to suspend her studies.
With a teaching certificate in hand, she was employed there as a graduate assistant in English, and then taught that subject at the Platteville State Teachers College (now University of Wisconsin–Platteville).
[9] These received critical acclaim, exemplified in this review by Dr. Herman Salinger of Duke University in 1975: "The wit and sometimes acid irony of these poems-- on love, death, and age, and the many faces of God-- are tempered with the wisdom of maturity.
Only a lifetime of living intimately and critically with words and, like Wordsworth, seeing 'into the life of things,' could produce such poems as 'Love is Loose in the Streets' or the Franciscan note of the series on 'The Creatures with Whom We Share the Earth.'