Ella Wheeler Wilcox

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EWW , a popular poet from the American mid-West, was born at mid nineteenth century and began publishing at an early age. Her output amounted to about eighty volumes (some posthumous), her poems (mostly first written for magazines) to almost two thousand items. Her essays were syndicated in newspapers; she produced a handful of novels, stories, and books of uplifting advice, and at the end of her life an autobiography. Her most famous topic was love; she also wrote sentimental verse about babies and about death, poems for public occasions, and pronouncements on spiritualism and the New Thought. Her moralising is facile and shallow but her comments on gender relations, mostly from early in her career, are trenchant. Notorious for writing of female sexuality while this was seen as unacceptable, she is unfailingly lively, accessible, and memorisable. Many of her poems were set to music.

Milestones

5 November 1850

Ella Wheeler (later EWW ) was born in Johnstown Center near Madison, Wisconsin, USA, the youngest of four children.
Dictionary of American Biography. Charles Scribner’s Sons.

May 1883

Ella Wheeler (later EWW ) had her first big success with Poems of Passion, which was refused by one Chicago publisher for immorality
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
before being accepted by a second.
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler. The Worlds and I. Gay and Hancock.
89
Watts, Emily Stipes. The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945. University of Texas Press.
144

Late 1918

EWW published both in New York and in London her autobiography, The Worlds and I.
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
Dictionary of American Biography. Charles Scribner’s Sons.

30 October 1919

EWW died at her home in Short Beach, Connecticut, USA.
Dictionary of American Biography. Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Biography

Birth and Influences

5 November 1850

Ella Wheeler (later EWW ) was born in Johnstown Center near Madison, Wisconsin, USA, the youngest of four children.
Dictionary of American Biography. Charles Scribner’s Sons.