How would you feel if you were once an acclaimed poet, but long after your death all that is remembered of your writings are a few clever lines from your poems?
Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1900) did not expect to become a writer, but when her family fell on hard times, and they could no longer
afford a subscription to her favorite magazine, The New York Mercury, she came up with the idea of submitting three poems. In return, she hoped to earn a subscription. Instead, she received a check for ten dollars. “The check from Leslie was a revelation,” she wrote in her diary. “I walked, talked, thought and dreamed in verse after that. A day which passed without a poem from my pen I considered lost and misused. Two each day was my idea of industry, and I once achieved eight. They sold–the majority–for three dollars or five dollars each. Sometimes I got ten dollars for a poem–that was always an event.”
Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s poems were eventually published in the major magazines of her day including Harper’s Bazaar, Harper’s Weekly, and The Saturday Evening Post and in volumes titled Poems of Passion, Poems of Power, Poems of Pleasure, Poems of Progress, and more. In her verse, she wrote about love and motherhood and the cruelty of war, –womanly topics addressed in the main part to women and their concerns, which may explain why her work has been relegated to the lower echelons of American letters. But during her time, she was a renowned writer and lecturer. And while her poetry has become the clichés of today, her book on positive thinking, The Heart of New Thought, is still marketed and considered relevant.
The following poem was her reflection on World War I.
WOMAN AND WAR
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
We women teach our little sons how wrong
And how ignoble blows are; school and church
Support our precepts, and inoculate
The growing minds with thoughts of love and peace.
“Let dogs delight to bark and bite,” we say;
But human beings with immortal souls
Must rise above the methods of a brute,
And walk with reason and with self-control.
And then–dear God! you men, you wise, strong men,
Our self-announced superiors in brain,
Our peers in judgment, you go forth to war!
You leap at one another, mutilate
And starve and kill your fellow-men, and ask
The world’s applause for such heroic deeds.
You boast and strut; and if no song is sung,
No laudatory epic writ in blood,
Telling how many widows you have made,
Why then, perforce, you say our bards are dead
And inspiration sleeps to wake no more.
And we, the women, we whose lives you are–
What can we do but sit in silent homes,
And wait and suffer? Not for us the blare
Of trumpets and the bugle’s call to arms–
For us no waving banners, no supreme
Triumphant hour of conquest. Ours the slow
Dread torture of uncertainty, each day
The bootless battle with the same despair,
And when at best your victories reach our ears,
There reaches with them, to our pitying hearts,
The thought of countless homes made desolate,
And other women weeping for their dead.
O men, wise men, superior beings, say,
Is there no substitute for war in this
Great age and era! If you answer “No,”
Then let us rear our children to be wolves,
And teach them from the cradle how to kill.
Why should we women waste our time and words
In talking peace, when men declare for war?
From Poems of Power by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Chicago : W. B. Conkey, 1902.
How many of Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s words of wisdom are familiar to you?
Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone; For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, But has trouble enough of its own.
There is no chance, no destiny, no fate, that can circumvent or hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined soul.
To sin in silence while others doth protest makes cowards out of men.
Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes.
There is no language that love does not speak
You may choose your words like a connoisseur, And polish it up with art, But the word that sways, and stirs, and stays, Is the word that comes from the heart.
A pat on the back is only a few vertebrae removed from a kick in the pants, but is miles ahead in results.
Let there be many windows to your soul, that all the glory of the world may beautify it.
The truest greatness lies in being kind, the truest wisdom in a happy mind.
Learn more
Find more of Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s quotes here.
Find biographical background and read more of her works here. http://www.ellawheelerwilcox.org