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Poems of Passion

Ella Wheeler Wilcox · poetry collection, 1883·1 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
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  • A preface defends the book against a public firestorm. Wilcox opens by explaining that four poems, Delilah, Ad Finem, Conversion, and Communism, caused so much agitation throughout the entire country that it sent a tremor across the Atlantic into the Old World. She calls Delilah her finest effort and argues that if the poem is immoral, then the history that inspired it is immoral.
  • Delilah chooses damnation over letting go of guilt. The speaker prays his sinful memories vanish until one returns, a woman with a smile like the splendor of the sun. He closes by rejecting salvation outright: Close, close in my arms I would fold you, and drop with you down to sweet Hell.
  • Solitude, her most famous poem, is buried here as one entry among many. It opens with the lines everyone still quotes without knowing the source: Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone; for the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, but has trouble enough of its own.
  • Ad Finem turns a metaphor of strangled love literal. The speaker describes clutching the white throat of the useless passion in a grip of death, certain he has killed it. It will not stay dead: it rose from its grave last night and stood by my bed till the early morning, over and over speaking her name.
  • Conversion turns a friend's offhand remark into scripture. Wilcox says a male friend told her love had made him believe in a heaven he once mocked, and she versified it directly. The poem's skeptic ends up swearing none but a God could mould such lips, trading every prophet's promise for one woman's kiss.
  • The book ends with a fable, not a love poem. Crows, a hawk, and a canary gather to gossip an eagle out of the sky, calling her unruly and ugly and voting to take the gilt from her glory. She rises anyway, rises, and upward swings, while the missiles of silly minds fall back useless and unavailing.
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it's the rare landmark text where the author's own defense of her work, printed as the preface, is as revealing as the poems it defends, including her flat admission that a poem about choosing Hell was her finest effort.

A wildly popular 1883 love-poem collection so scandalous that Wilcox opens the book with a five-page defense of her own work.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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