Ella Wheeler Wilcox

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.