Word: ballou
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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PERIOD PIECE: ELLA WHEELER WILCOX AND HER TIMES - Jenny Ballou- Houghton. Mifflin...
...syndicated articles in Hearst papers; 3) triumphantly covered the funeral of Queen Victoria for the New York American, by writing, on the spot, a poem called The Queen's Last Ride; 4) been presented as a famous American at the Court of St. James's. Says Jenny Ballou: "Considering the noise round her during her life, there was ... a sodden silence thrown over her immediately upon her death." She is not remembered...
Biographer Ballou introduces her subject with an overwritten essay, then settles down to a straightforward, less flighty account of Ella's dreamy girlhood in an irritable and defeated Wisconsin farm family, her indefatigable poem writing (sometimes eight a day), her conquering arrival in Milwaukee, her instinctive refusal of such rare, insufficiently flattering criticism as Julia Ward Howe's ("she thought [Ella's ability] might be developed into real talent with study and hard work"), her fatal love of making a sensation, gratified by the tempest of propriety that erected Poems of Passion, her brief affair with James...
...Ella was not absurd, and it is the special virtue of Jenny Ballou's book that she makes that plain. Some of Ella's first poems were "lovely in their lilt, overbrimming with an authentic freshness of emotion." She had great energy, great sincerity, great generosity, and on occasion great good sense. Even when she became a fixture of yellow journalism, her spontaneity remained untainted by cynicism. What was it that led her on into the self-deception that finally broke down in her last tragic years? ("I shall be forgotten," she said, "while more careful and conscientious...
...Jenny Ballou names two reasons: 1) her period's democratic ideal of "making good" got the better of her; 2) "No critic warned her. Instead of examining the poems under their noses, they accused her of having experienced personally all the thrills [she] described...