When she wasn’t straining for sentiment or grandiosity, Ella Wheeler Wilcox could produce competent and whimsical verse.
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The years have not been kind to Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919). A prolific writer of verse, she had excellent sales of her poetry collections in the late 19th century. But as you might guess from, say, the title of her 1892 volume, “Poems of Sentiment,” she seemed an example of all that 20th-century literary taste would deride as maudlin Victorianism. A poet as good as Longfellow has a sentimentality worth rescuing from the Edwardians’ derision, but surely Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s treacle remains the gooey stuff we thought it.
Maybe not. Well, probably yes, she will turn out to be as unbearable as we imagine her: a figure for all the old wrongheaded ways that we were taught to scorn without bothering to read. Her forays into the sappiest forms of ghost-speaking, table-tapping spiritualism did no favors for her reputation among later generations.
And yet, to browse a little in her work is to see that Wilcox had some genuine talent. Of course, there are reams of her work that limp their way through sentiments as over-easy as an egg: “A mighty conflagration. Ah the cost! / House, home, and thoughtless child alike were lost” (a poem warning maidens not to be too free with their swains, lest they metaphorically burn the house down). And then there are the poems that reach for some high moralistic notion, the best of which may be “Solitude,” with its once much-quoted lines, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; / Weep, and you weep alone.” (“Solitude” holds a sentimental place for the editors of the Sun’s Poem of the Day feature, since its first publication was in the Feb. 25, 1883, issue of The New York Sun, in a weekly column with the wonderful title “Poetry of the Period.”)
When she wasn’t straining for sentiment or grandiosity, however, Wilcox could produce competent and whimsical verse. Take, for example, “March” from her 1892 collection, today’s Poem of the Day. Playing with the idea of a woman calling for religious reformation — someone who, like John the Baptist, prepares the way — Wilcox indulges the image of the month of March as an unkempt street preacher. The poem’s twelve lines of rhymed pentameter are clever and well observed. The ragged prophet’s “loud insistent tones” prove “more rasping than the wrongs which she bemoans.” She “wearies all who hear, / While yet we know the need of such reform.” And that’s March, isn’t it? “She is not fair nor beautiful to see. / But merry April and sweet smiling May / Come not till March has first prepared the way.”
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