Ella Wheeler Wilcox: A Major Poet, 1901
Ella Wheeler Wilcox: Background
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Ella Wheeler Wilcox, a journalist and popular American poet in the late 19th and early 20th century, is little known or studied today. She can't be dismissed as a minor poet, her biographer, Jenny Ballou, says, if the size and appreciation of her audience is what counts. But, Ballou concludes, she should probably be counted as a bad major poet. Wilcox' style is sentimental and romantic, and while she was compared in her lifetime to Walt Whitman because of the feeling she poured into her poems, at the same time she maintained a very traditional form, unlike Whitman or Emily Dickinson.
While few today recognize her name, some of her lines are still very familiar, such as these:
"Laugh and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone."
(from "Solitude")
She was widely published in women's magazines and literary magazines, and was sufficiently known to be included in Bartlett's Famous Quotations by 1919. But her popularity did not prevent critics of the time from either ignoring her work or rating it poorly, to Wilcox' dismay.
It is ironic that she was able to achieve as a writer what was still rare for women to achieve -- wide popularity and a comfortable living -- while her work was denigrated because it seemed too feminine!
When the nineteenth century was ending and the twentieth century about to begin, Wilcox distilled her sense of despair at the way people often treated one another, and hope that people could change into a poem she called "The Meeting of the Centuries." I've included the poem on this site in its entirety, as published in 1901 as the opening poem in her collection, Poems of Power.
She also weighed in on the question of woman's proper relationship to man with another poem in Poems of Power, "Woman to Man." In this response to a critique of the women's rights movement, she uses her sly wit to ask poetically: whose fault is the movement to change women's roles? Her answer is very much in keeping with the culture of America as the twentieth century opened.
Next page > The Meeting of the Centuries > Page 1, 2, 3
Text © 2000-2001 Jone Johnson Lewis. All rights reserved.
