Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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Ella Wheeler Wilcox (November 5, 1850–October 30, 1919) was an American author and poet. Her best-known work was Poems of Passion, and her autobiography, The Worlds and I was published in 1918 shortly before her death.
A popular rather than a literary poet, her poems express sentiments of cheer and optimism in plainly written, rhyming verse. Her world view is expressed in the title of her poem "Whatever Is—Is Best" (suggesting an echo of Pope's "Whatever is, is right."). None of her work was included by F. O. Matthiesen in The Oxford Book of American Verse, but Hazel Felleman chose no less than thirteen of her poems for Best Loved Poems of the American People, while Martin Gardner selected "Solitude" and "The Winds of Fate" for Best Remembered Poems.
She is frequently cited in parody collections (Pegasus Descending, others). Sinclair Lewis indicates Babbitt's lack of literary sophistication by having refer to a piece of verse as "one of the classic poems, like 'If' by Kipling, or Ella Wheeler Wilcox's 'The Man Worth While.'" The latter opens:
- It is easy enough to be pleasant,
- When life flows by like a song,
- But the man worth while is one who will smile,
- When everything goes dead wrong.
Her most famous lines open her poem "Solitude":
- Laugh and the world laughs with you,
- Weep, and you weep alone;
- For this brave old earth must borrow its mirth,
- But has trouble enough of its own.
"The Winds of Fate" is a marvel of economy, far too short to summarize. In full:
- One ship drives east, and another west
- With the self-same winds that blow;
- 'Tis the set of the sails
- And not the gales
- That decides the way to go.
- Like the winds of the sea are the ways of fate,
- As they voyage along through life;
- 'Tis the will of the soul
- That decides its goal,
- And not the calm or the strife.
External links
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox (http://www.ellawheelerwilcox.org/) biographies and poems
- Cordula's Web (http://www.cordula.ws/a-wilcoxew.html) features illustrated poems by Ella Wheeler Wilcox