Poems of Pleasure E-Book

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

• Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

In "Poems of Pleasure," Ella Wheeler Wilcox explores the exuberance of life through a collection of lyrical poems that celebrate joy, love, and the beauty of everyday experiences. Employing a vibrant and accessible style, Wilcox balances profound philosophical insights with a sense of whimsy, making her work appealing to a broad audience. The poems are situated within the late 19th-century context of American literature, characterized by a shift towards personal expression and emotional authenticity, themes that resonate strongly in Wilcox's writing. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, a prominent poet and advocate for women's rights, gained recognition for her ability to convey universal emotions with heartfelt sincerity. Born in 1850, Wilcox's personal experiences and her resilience in the face of societal constraints shaped her worldview, influencing her belief that joy can be a source of strength. Her background in journalism and her engagement with social issues imbue her work with an awareness of the complexities of the human experience, making her voice both relevant and timeless. "Poems of Pleasure" is a remarkable invitation to embrace the joy and beauty in life's moments. Wilcox's ability to encapsulate human emotions with such clarity makes this collection a delightful read for poetry enthusiasts and those seeking inspiration alike. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.

Leseprobe

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Poems of Pleasure

Enriched edition. Capturing Joy and Beauty: A Collection of Timeless Verses

In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience.

Introduction, Studies and Commentaries by Ryan Wells

Edited and published by Good Press, 2022

[email protected]

EAN 4064066137106

Table of Contents

Introduction

Historical Context

Synopsis (Selection)

Poems of Pleasure

Analysis

Reflection

Introduction

Table of Contents

Poems of Pleasure presents a unified gathering of verse by the American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, offering readers a sustained meditation on joy, desire, solace, and moral resolve. Conceived as a self-contained volume, it moves through varied emotional registers while remaining anchored in a single, distinctive voice. The book’s purpose is not encyclopedic coverage of an author’s entire output, but a curated experience: poems arranged to trace the contours of pleasure as an aesthetic and ethical force. Read straight through or sampled at leisure, the sequence builds a cumulative portrait of how feeling, thought, and action intersect in everyday life.

This volume is devoted entirely to poetry. It is not a compendium of novels, plays, essays, letters, or diaries, nor is it a complete works. Instead, it presents a focused body of lyric and reflective verse that stands on its own terms. The scope is intentionally concentrated: it gathers poems that converse with one another across themes of love, faith, courage, and fate, allowing readers to encounter a coherent vision rather than an exhaustive archive. The result is a book designed for immersion—an invitation to return repeatedly to its patterns of sound, sentiment, and idea.

Within these covers, the poems span several modes of verse. There are compact lyrics that crystallize a single emotion or insight; narrative sketches that hint at lives and choices beyond the page; dramatic monologues that let a speaker reason, plead, or reminisce; meditative pieces that approach prayer in tone; and descriptive vignettes attentive to landscapes, the sea, and the city. Some poems offer counsel or consolation; others stage contrasts or debates. Across the variety, each piece is self-contained and accessible, while contributing to a broader mosaic in which intimate feeling and public exhortation share the same musical, memorable language.

Wilcox’s stylistic hallmarks are immediately recognizable: clear diction, steady rhythms, and prominent end-rhyme support an oratorical cadence suited to recitation. She favors rhetorical balance and antithesis, often setting paired impulses in dialogue and guiding the reader toward a resolved perspective. Many poems work toward aphoristic closes that crystallize the argument, while others rely on narrative turns that reframe earlier stanzas. Direct address draws readers into the moral and emotional stakes without obscurity, and the musical line carries ideas forward with momentum. The effect is a verse that is plainspoken yet emphatic, structured yet warm, didactic yet humane.

Despite its title, the collection explores pleasure alongside its inevitable companions: absence, doubt, grief, and the demands of conscience. Love appears in many guises—ardent, steadfast, tested, or reconciled—while friendship, marriage, and family provide contexts for loyalty and forgiveness. Elsewhere, poems consider vocation and art, the claims of society versus the individual, and the interplay of city life, sea air, and pastoral quiet. Reflections on sleep, mortality, and possible immortality sit beside exhortations to resolve, optimism, and acceptance. Throughout, pleasure is treated not as indulgence alone, but as a discipline that shapes character, purpose, and peace.

As a whole, these poems remain significant for how they align emotional candor with an ethics of encouragement. Wilcox writes with an inclusive, conversational clarity that invites different kinds of readers: those seeking comfort, those craving courage, and those curious about the workings of heart and will. The poems’ memorability arises from their balance of story and statement, music and maxim. They exemplify a strand of popular American verse that valued intelligibility, moral reflection, and the spoken voice. In this collection, that tradition is given vivid expression through themes and forms that still reward attentive reading.

Approached today, the volume offers both historical texture and immediate resonance. Readers may choose to linger over the cadence of a single piece, or to trace recurring motifs—paired perspectives, turns from sorrow to resolve, nature as mirror of the mind—across the sequence. The language is direct, but the craft rewards close listening to how arguments unfold, how images clarify feeling, and how final lines recast what came before. If its idiom reflects its era, its central commitments—to compassion, perseverance, and the shaping of joy from hardship—remain contemporary. This book thus serves as a companionable guide to feeling and to living.

Historical Context

Table of Contents

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919), born in Johnstown, Wisconsin, matured as a poet amid the post–Civil War expansion that turned the rural Midwest toward print culture and popular entertainment. Publishing verse as a teenager and achieving notoriety with Poems of Passion (1883), she married Robert Marius Wilcox in 1884 and moved from New York to Short Beach, Branford, Connecticut. Poems of Pleasure, issued in the late 1880s (widely circulated from 1888), consolidated her reputation for accessible, aphoristic lyrics on love, hope, and conduct. The volume’s recurrent themes—equanimity in adversity, moral choice, and the consolations of beauty—reflect a career straddling the Gilded Age and the dawning Progressive Era, when poetry still prospered as a public art.

Wilcox’s popularity was inseparable from late nineteenth‑century print capitalism. Gift‑book publishers in Chicago and New York—among them Belford, Clarke & Co., W. B. Conkey, and later M. A. Donohue—pumped inexpensive editions into a mass market nourished by newsstands, mail‑order catalogues, and parlor shelves. Recitation culture, the lyceum and Chautauqua circuits, and Sunday newspaper supplements gave her rhymed counsel wide reach; newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst eagerly syndicated such verse. The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago crystallized this blend of spectacle and self‑help, a milieu that received moralizing lyrics, epigrams, and scened miniatures with enthusiasm. Many poems in Poems of Pleasure were composed to be spoken aloud and clipped for keepsakes.

The period’s debates over gender and morality form a crucial backdrop. The Comstock Act (1873) policed sexual discourse, and Poems of Passion had tested its prudery; Poems of Pleasure often channels the same energies into ethical dialectics—chastening hypocrisy, defending women’s interiority, and weighing romantic agency. As the women’s suffrage movement consolidated into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1890), and as Frances Willard’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union linked temperance to social reform, Wilcox’s lyrics treated fidelity, desire, and domestic conflict with unusual frankness for a mainstream poet. The poems’ insistence on reciprocity in love and accountability in conduct aligned with an emergent “New Woman” ethos without abandoning sentimental conventions familiar to a broad audience.

Wilcox’s optimism drew on American metaphysical currents. Transcendentalist moral confidence (Emerson’s essays still popular) fed into New Thought and mind‑cure philosophies of the 1880s–1890s—associated with Emma Curtis Hopkins and the Unity movement (Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, 1889)—and paralleled Christian Science (Mary Baker Eddy, 1879) and Theosophy (Helena Blavatsky’s society, 1875). Poems invoking immutable “law,” mental attitude, and answered prayer reflect this milieu: suffering becomes a test, belief a force, serenity a practice. Later, after Robert Wilcox’s death in 1916, she turned to spiritualism and psychical inquiry, impulses she discussed in her memoir The Worlds and I (1918). Across the collection, ethical maxims blend with metaphysical assurance, framing joy and grief within a purposeful, universe‑wide order.

Industrial modernity supplies another frame. Between the Panic of 1893 and the recovery of the late 1890s, Americans saw stark class divides, great migrations to cities, and labor conflicts from Haymarket (Chicago, 1886) to the Pullman Strike (1894). Immigration through Ellis Island (opened 1892) transformed urban life; New York’s electrified streets and tenements embodied both opportunity and alienation. Wilcox’s plainspoken, populist diction—avoiding classical allusion in favor of moral clarity—suited readers negotiating these pressures. Poems in Poems of Pleasure that weigh achievement, necessity, recompense, or distrust share the era’s didactic impulse: they instruct individual conscience while tacitly critiquing pretension, fatalism, and social snobbery, imagining ethical self‑making as the citizen’s proper answer to rapid change.

Theatrical and popular‑entertainment cultures shaped both Wilcox’s subjects and her audience. The touring star system, managed by figures like Augustin Daly and Charles Frohman, sent celebrated performers across the United States, while vaudeville and melodrama flourished; Sarah Bernhardt’s American tours exemplified the celebrity aura that fascinated readers. Wilcox wrote for a public that attended matinees and memorized recitations, and she often portrayed the actor’s craft, the costs of fame, and the poignancy of backstage life. Her residence on Connecticut’s shore also supplied local color: pieces evoking sea breezes and the Thimble Islands (off Branford in Long Island Sound) situate private reverie within coastal landscapes that middle‑class vacationers of the 1890s–1900s would recognize.

Late‑Victorian engagements with science and psychology inflect Wilcox’s meditations on death and continuity. Debates after Darwin (1859), Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary ethics, and William James’s Principles of Psychology (1890) kept the mind’s power and the soul’s fate in popular view. Organized psychical research (London’s SPR, 1882; the American society, 1885) made séances and survival a parlor topic as much as a laboratory one. Wilcox’s verses on sleep, mortality, and immortality offer consolations consistent with this speculative climate, balancing sentiment with quasi‑philosophical assurance. During World War I (1914–1918), readers revisited such poems for solace; Wilcox’s public readings and war‑relief work amplified their reach, turning private grief into a shared ethical and spiritual vocabulary.

Reception and legacy illuminate the collection’s historical place. Wilcox, like contemporaries James Whitcomb Riley and Edwin Markham, thrived in a pre‑modernist marketplace that prized rhyme, clarity, and uplift. Though later critics aligned with Imagism and high modernism (Pound’s 1912 manifestos, Eliot’s 1915 Prufrock) dismissed her didacticism, her lines circulated globally in scrapbooks, school readers, postcards, and sermons. Poems of Pleasure went through multiple editions across the 1890s–1910s, a staple of gift culture and platform readings. The book embodies a transitional American ethos: Victorian moral earnestness adapted to mass media, confident self‑culture tempered by sympathy, and a metaphysical optimism robust enough to address loss without relinquishing the promise of purposeful joy.

Synopsis (Selection)

Table of Contents

SURRENDER.

A meditation on yielding the self—often to love or fate—and finding unexpected freedom and peace.

THE BIRTH OF THE OPAL.

A mythic origin of the opal, born of sunlight and tears, symbolizing beauty forged from joy and sorrow.

THE DIFFERENCE.

Contrasts appearance and reality in matters of the heart, showing how love changes perceptions.

TWO LOVES.

Weighs two forms of love—earthly passion versus higher devotion—and the choice they demand.

THE WAY OF IT.

Observes life’s ironies and the ordinary course of events that upend expectations.

ANGEL OR DEMON.

Questions whether overpowering love redeems or destroys, blurring the line between blessing and curse.

DAWN.

Welcomes a new beginning, with first light symbolizing hope after darkness.

PEACE AND LOVE.

Asserts that lasting peace arises from love’s gentleness and understanding.

THE INSTRUCTOR.

Names life—often pain, love, or nature—as the great teacher that shapes character and soul.

BLASE.

Explores ennui bred by excess pleasure and the desire to feel deeply again.

THE SEA-BREEZE AND THE SCARF.

A playful vignette where a teasing wind and a flying scarf become metaphors for flirtation and freedom.

THREE AND ONE.

Considers how three separate forces—mind, heart, and will—must unite to make a complete life.

INBORN.

Reflects on the innate traits we carry from birth that guide destiny.