Ella Wheeler Wilcox

“ This is a fair example of the style of the book, the character of whose contents indicates that the wheels of perpetual motion were still going around in Joyce’s head. The portrait which serves as a frontispiece to Jewels of Memory confirms this impression. The face is unquestionably that of a man of unstable mentality. It is not without a certain cheap attractiveness, but it is stamped with weakness and dissipation, and the angle at which the broad-brimmed hat is worn betrays the inordinate vanity of the man who wears it. ”

“ Joyce produced his proof. Of course it was never forthcoming; and yet he claimed the poem had been in circulation for twenty years before I wrote it.
“I believe my experience one which nearly every author has known at some time in his or her career,” concludes Mrs. Wilcox. “Though misery may like company, the fact does not prevent one’s own suffering, when made the victim of a man of this type, who belongs to the poison insect order of humanity. He is only an insect, and yet his persistent buzz and sting can produce great discomfort.” ”

“ The Chicago Herald, after pointing out the poisonous character of the book’s contents, ventured the hope “that Miss Ella Wheeler will relapse into Poems of Decency now that the New York Sun has voiced the opinion of respectability that her Poems of Passion are like the songs of half-tipsy wantons.” Nowhere was a voice raised in her defense.
The most embarrassing feature of the situation was that she had just become engaged to be married to a man who, as it turned out, was to be her lifelong lover and husband ”

“ As it is, there is none; nor does memory recall any ode of Horace, “the Falernian wine poet,” to whom Joyce refers in such off-hand fashion, dealing with the subject of Mrs. Wilcox’s poem. There can be no doubt, indeed, that Joyce’s story was manufactured out of whole cloth. If he wrote the verses in 1863 they would certainly have appeared somewhere before they were published over Ella Wheeler’s name twenty years later, and he would undoubtedly have included them among the poems printed in the first edition of his book. ”

“ In January, 1863, when he was twenty-one years old and adjutant of the Twenty-fourth Kentucky regiment, at that time camped at the “Oaklands,” near Louisville, Ky., he secured a forty-eight hours’ pass and went in to Louisville to call on George D. Prentice, the editor of the Louisville Journal, whose poem, “The Closing Year,” Joyce says he considered the finest in American literature. Joyce had had some correspondence with Prentice, who had published a few of his poems, so he proceeded to the Journal office, introduced himself and indulged in some cheap wit which he faithfully records. ”

“ The book bore the daring title Poems of Passion, but its author, far from being an adventuress, was a little Wisconsin girl named Ella Wheeler, the daughter of a poor farmer, who had lived all her life in the cramped environment of a tiny hamlet called Johnson Centre, whose knowledge of the world was bounded by a few short visits to Madison and Milwaukee, and whose acquaintance with literature was confined to the menus furnished by the New York Mercury and the New York Ledger, and to the novels of Ouida, Mary J. Holmes and Mrs. ”

“ Her friends turned away from her in disapproval, and many of them expressed the opinion that she should have waited until she was dead, or at least married, before permitting the poems to appear, since they dealt with matters with which no decent girl could possibly be familiar. ”