Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850 – 1919)

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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. Her most enduring work was "The Way Of The World", which contains the lines, "Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone". Her autobiography, The Worlds and I, was published in 1918, a year before her death.


Ella Wheeler Wilcox
A popular poet rather than a literary poet, in her poems she expresses 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 Alexander Pope's "Whatever is, is right."

None of Wilcox's works were included by F. O. Matthiessen in The Oxford Book of American Verse, but Hazel Felleman chose no fewer than fourteen of her poems for Best Loved Poems of the American People, while Martin Gardner selected "The Way Of The World" and "The Winds of Fate" for Best Remembered Poems.

She is frequently cited in anthologies of bad poetry, such as The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse and Very Bad Poetry. Sinclair Lewis indicates Babbitt's lack of literary sophistication by having him 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 "The Way Of The World":
Laugh and the world laughs with you, Weep, and you weep alone;The good 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 drives westWith the selfsame winds that blow.'Tis the set of the sails,And Not the gales,That tell us the way to go.Like the winds of the sea are the ways of fate;As we voyage along through life,'Tis the set of a soulThat decides its goal,And not the calm or the strife.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox cared about alleviating animal suffering, as can be seen from her poem, "Voice of the Voiceless". It begins as follows:
So many gods, so many creeds,So many paths that wind and wind,While just the art of being kindIs all the sad world needs.I am the voice of the voiceless;Through me the dumb shall speak,Till the deaf world’s ear be made to hearThe wrongs of the wordless weak.From street, from cage, and from kennel,From stable and zoo, the wailOf my tortured kin proclaims the sinOf the mighty against the frail.

She made a very popular appearance during World War I in France, reciting her poem, The Stevedores ("Here's to the Army stevedores, lusty and virile and strong...") while visiting a camp of 9,000 US Army stevedores.[4]

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such as Poems of Pleasure (1897) and Maurine and Other Poems (1888), states that:

“India - The land of Vedas, the remarkable works contain not only religious ideas for a perfect life, but also facts which science has proved true. Electricity, radium, electronics,
airship, all were known to the seers who founded the Vedas.” |