Word: ellas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
PERIOD PIECE: ELLA WHEELER WILCOX AND HER TIMES - Jenny Ballou- Houghton. Mifflin...
...Ella Wheeler Wilcox* wrote the first of many pricelessly bad novels at the age of nine in the year of Grant's Wilderness Campaign. One of the last and most notable of her countless poems was Soldiers, Come Back Clean, published by Hearst's New York Journal in the year of the battle of Cambrai. It ran: I may lie in the mud of the trenches, I may reek with blood and mire, But I will control, by the God in my soul, The might of my man's desire...
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 Wheeler Wilcox soon appeared in New York salons trailing her inimitable chiffons, a light-haired poetess whose eyes "had tigerish gleams when she wore her favorite topaz...
...that's all. No contracts had been signed for him, and at the time I talked to him Mr. Freedley was trying to get Louis Armstrong; If Louis wanted too much and it was felt his voice wasn't good enough, he was going to listen to Taft Jorden (Ella Fitzgerald's band) who would have been swell for the part...