A Summer of Writers

A SUMMER OF WRITERS

MY INTRODUCTIONS TO POETRY

The only poem that I actually remember studying in high school was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T.S. Eliot, which was his first professionally published poem, written while he was in college, and published in 1915. As an eighth or ninth grade student I found myself totally mystified by the poem, and possibly even more so by the class discussion in which I perceived our teacher as inexorably directing us to some fixed interpretation of the poem. I don’t even remember being given the backstory or sly references which now appear in articles about the poem, just the sense that there was a specific meaning. Indeed, I was given the sense that any given poem had a static meaning, and that not only was there a fixed meaning, but the poet had to hide it and make the reader work to find it.

Perhaps those notions informed my own first attempt at writing a poem, when the same teacher, whom I actually adored, set us each to creating a poem in class. I wrote a poem about a rabbit being killed, and its bloody sense of death coming over it—stop, I know what you’re thinking, a teenager obsessed with death and dark things. I don’t think so, I was just following the model of Eliot, dark and mysterious, poetic, and with hidden meaning that the poet made the reader work for.

I have since moved past the notion of any poem having some static mysterious meaning, and I never got into T.S. Eliot. I still love the memory of that first poem I wrote because it was a revelation, my inspiration to become a writer. My teacher seemed impressed with the poem and I really warmed to the sense of praise. I had been previously typecast as the shy wonky math whiz in my tiny girl’s school, and to find out I could be a poet, too! What a rush!

This post is built around the summer of 1914 at Glenside Park, the then-fading resort at the Deserted Village. Two poets and a playwright were guests during the only summer in which Anna Molloy Walsh managed the resort. One of the poets was then one of the most famous poets in America and perhaps the world, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, now sunken into obscurity, except for a phrase from one of her poems, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone.” Ironically, T.S. Eliot figures in this post, because it may be, in part, his characterization of what poetry should be and who should be counted as poets of importance which led to the disappearance of Ella Wheeler Wilcox from any poetry anthologies and from most poetry study today.

ARBITERS OF LITERARY WORTH

I love when things come together in my research into the people and actions at one small New Jersey Deserted Village. In researching Roberto de la Selva, the artist who painted murals in one of the Village cottages, I dug into his shared history with his more famous brother, the poet Salomón de la Selva. Although Salomón was the first Latin American nominated for a Nobel Prize, his poetry is virtually unknown today, at least (or at most) in the United States. This is in spite of the considerable time he spent in New York City, trying to achieve a collective cultural appreciation among writers and artists from various countries and traditions—his “Pan-American” project, described in Peter Hulme’s The Dinner at Gonfarone’s.

In his book, Hulme suggests that writers such as Salomón were dismissed by Eliot, who, through the literary criticism he wrote in addition to poetry, set himself up as one of the arbiters of poetry worth remembering. He began this process of winnowing out the chaff, as it were, in a famous 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”¹ I found the article rather dense and hard to decipher; somewhere I saw a suggestion that a repeated reading of an essay still considered to be “a key text in modern literary criticism”² would allow me to understand it, but I am very much doubting it. Hulme talks about the influence of this essay:

Literary history has usually been written by the winners, particularly when a generation of writers contains major critics and academics who can determine what gets published and taught; and Anglo-American modernism—‘high modernism’—certainly won, in the sense that it became seen as the dominant and defining literary movement of the twentieth century. Already in the summer of 1919 Eliot would publish his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, offering a first sketch of the new literary history and suggesting a brutal oblivion for writers not regarded as part of the main literary current as defined by Eliot himself. In the fullness of time, some judgements might be tempered or even reversed, and the occasional forgotten author resurrected, but the version of early twentieth-century literary history established by those high modernist protagonists is only very slowly being questioned a century later.³

In another essay of literary criticism published two years later, Eliot further declared that:

We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. . . .Hence we get something which looks very much like the conceit—we get, in fact, a method curiously similar to that of the ‘metaphysical poets’, similar also in its use of obscure words and of simple phrasing.⁴

An introductory essay by Malcolm Cowley, a later literary critic, in my own high school text from senior year, entitled American Literature Survey, published in 1962 and revised in 1968, doesn’t mention “modernism,” but it does spend some time describing what Cowley saw as coming before Eliot and his generation:

The enemy was of course the Genteel Tradition, which held that no book should be published unless it was a “decent” work that could “safely” be placed on the center table in the parlor and red by proper young girls. “It is the ‘young girl’ and the family center table,” Frank Norris once complained, “that determine the standard of the American short story.” He might also have said that they determined the standard of American novels, plays, essays, and poetry. Although his complaint was made in the 1890s, there was no improvement during the early 1900s, when in fact the Genteel Tradition seemed more oppressive than ever.⁵

Cowley is described as “one of the major literary historians of the twentieth century” in a biographical sketch on the website of the Poetry Foundation, which also notes him to be somewhat “cool” and not idolatrous, in his “estimate of his most successful elder contemporaries, including Joyce, Eliot, and Proust.”⁶ I imagine that his estimation of poetry of importance in the twentieth century—as reflected in the book I studied twentieth century literature from—still has weight, as does the criticism of Eliot.

It is not my intention here to do any kind of comprehensive look at how poetic trends have been viewed over the years, simply to suggest that many writers, quite famous in their own times, have faded into obscurity not simply on their own, but with a helpful push by the popular literary critics of their time and since. Whether Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s poetry should be in a high school text is not my topic of discussion. As a fiercely independent, determined—and highly visible and popular—female author of the late nineteenth century into early twentieth century, Ella is worthy of study, regardless of the value of her poetry. I will use her first name, in order to easily distinguish her from her husband, mentioned later in the post.

THE SUMMER OF 1914—INTRODUCTION

You may recall from my last post that during the summer of 1914, Anna Molloy Walsh, the daughter of longtime Glenside Park resort managers Thomas and Annie Molloy, juggled the management of the resort with hosting Fresh Air kids at her Summit home. Anna’s young son, 4 at the time, apparently never forgot the “distinctive taste of the russet apples from the orchard.”

I was there the summer of 1914, and after me Mrs. Thompson. I don’t think Mrs. Thompson was there more than two years and that was the last it was used as a resort. Mrs. Thompson was a guest the summer I was there. Mr. Thompson died the following winter—then she tried running the dining room she afterward moved to Summit—her son married and she lived with him.

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Some other guests that summer were Mr. Atha—Mr. Fredrick Faulks—lawyer home Elizabeth—office Newark—Mrs. Faulks was a writer under pen name “Theodosia Garretson Pickering” [sic]—wrote mostly verse—Ella Wheeler Wilcox was a guest of Mrs. Faulks several times that summer.

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Paul West was another guest—newspaper man—I think he was with the old New York World—cartoonist would better describe him—at that time he had a cartoon running in the paper—“Bill the Office Boy”—he went over seas with Red Cross died in Paris—

So, 1914 has always been “the Summer of Writers” for me. I like to imagine Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Theodosia Pickering Garrison, and Paul West getting together to share their works, and maybe even doing readings in the Inn for other resort guests.

I have discovered that 1914 was something of a banner year for all three writers, as I will discuss later in this post, after a closer look at Ella’s life and career.

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

Of the three writers, Wilcox was the most famous—indeed, during her lifetime, being counted among the authors most widely read in the world. She started writing at age eight, and wrote her first novel of eleven chapters, each “headed with original rhymes” at the age of nine (apparently never published).⁷ Ella characterizes her family as having very limited financial means, but they perceived themselves as the “intellectual aristocrats of the locality,” “a Western prairie” near Madison, Wisconsin, even though they only had a few books and access to one weekly newspaper. When it was necessary for the family to discontinue their subscription to Ella’s beloved New York Mercury, she was distraught. She resolved to submit several essays and ask for a subscription in payment.

That was her first publication success, and thereafter she continued to submit pieces to various publications, still asking for copies of the publications in return. When one of the publications sent a check along with the copies for her first published poems, it was a revelation to young Ella, who immediately started a more firm regimen of writing at least one poem or piece a day, submitting things repeatedly until they were accepted, and not letting rejection slow her down, but continuously resubmitting.

Everything in life was material for me—my own emotions, the remarks or experiences of my comrades and associates, sentences from books I read, and some phases of nature.

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Much of my earlier work was tinctured with melancholy, both real and imaginary. Young poets almost invariably write of sorrow.

Although she tried her hand at various forms, both prose and poetry, and on various themes, she found that editors were especially asking for her “little heartache verses—those are what our readers like.”

ELLA’S POEMS

If we accept Cowley’s notion of poetry before writers such as Eliot as being meant for the Genteel Reader, many of Wilcox’s poems could be considered to fit that description. She wrote many seemingly moralistic poems, including the following poem, “The Price He Paid,” which as we will see, figures in the story of 1914:

The Price He Paid
I said I would have my fling,
And do what a young may may;
And I didn’t believe a thing
That the parsons have to say
I didn’t believe in a God
That gives us blood like fire
Then flings us into hell because
We answer the call of desire

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And I said: “Religion is rot,
And the laws of the world are nil;
For the bad man is he who is caught
And cannot foot his bill.
And there is no place called hell;
And heaven is only a truth
When a man has his way with a maid,
In the fresh keen hour of youth.

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‘And money can buy us grace,
If it rings on the plate of the church:
And money can neatly erase
Each sign of a sinful smirch.’
For I saw men everywhere,
Hotfooting the road of vice;
And women and preachers smiled on them
As long as they paid the price.

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So I had my joy of life
I went the pace of the town;
And then I took me a wife
And started to settle down.
I had gold enough and to spare
For all of the simple joys
That belong with a house and a home
And a brood of girls and boys.

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I married a girl with health
And virtue and spotless fame.
I gave in exchange my wealth
And a proud old family name.
And I gave her the love of a heart
Grown sated and sick of sin!
My deal with the devil was all cleaned up,
And the last bill handed in.

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She was going to bring me a child
And when in labour she cried
With love and fear I was wild—
But now I wish she had died.
For the son she bore me was blind
And crippled and weak and sore!
And his mother was left a wreck.
It was so she settled my score.

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I said I must have my fling,
And they knew the path I would go,
Yet no one told me a thing
Of what I needed to know.
Folks talk too much of a soul
From heavenly joys debarred—
And not enough of babes unborn,
By the sins of their fathers scarred.⁸

But it was not her moralistic poems which exposed Wilcox to the most criticism and censure, but poems which landed her squarely in what was dubbed “the Milwaukee School of Fleshly Poetry.” Wilcox had already had one collection of her poems published professionally (apparently some collections had already been published “by subscription) in 1882 as Maurine and Other Poems, when readers started asking for a second book. Wilcox explains the progression as follows in an autobiography commissioned by The Cosmopolitan and published in 1901:

When publishing “Maurine,” I had purposely omitted more than twoscore poems of a very romantic nature, in order to save the volume from too much sentiment. Letters began to come to me requesting copies of these verses—ardent love-songs which had appeared in various periodicals. This suggested to me the idea of issuing a book of love-poems to be called “Poems of Passion.”⁹

Wilcox submitted the resulting manuscript to Jansen & McClurg, who had published Maurine. She describes the result as follows, also in her Cosmopolitan autobiography:

As just related, every poem in the book had been published in various periodicals and had brought forth no criticism. My amazement can hardly be imabined, therefore, when Jansen & McClurg returned the manuscript of my volume, intimating that it was immoral. I told the contents of their letter to friends in Milwaukee, and it reached the ears of a sensational morning newspaper. The next day a column article appeared with large headlines:–

TOO LOUD FOR CHICAGO,

THE SCARLET CITY BY THE LAKE SHOCKED

BY A BADGER GIRL, WHOSE VERSES

OUT-SWINBURNE SWINBURNE AND

OUT-WHITMAN WHITMAN

Every newspaper in the land caught up the story, and I found myself an object of unpleasant notoriety in a brief space of time. I had always been a local celebrity, but this was quite another experience. Some friends who had admired and praised, now criticized—though they did not know why. I was advised to burn my offensive manuscript and assured that in time I might live down the shame I had brought on myself. Yet these same friends had seen these verses in periodicals and praised them.

All the criticism only made Wilcox more determined than ever to have the book published. Indeed, she points out that one of the poems found most scandalous, “Delilah,” had not only been previously published, but was based on a well-known story.

Wilcox reports that “a Chicago publisher saw his opportunity and offered to bring out the book, and it was an immediate success.”¹⁰ The proceeds allowed her to do necessary repairs on the family home, and to move beyond financial insecurity. A year later, she married Robert Wilcox, a man who had started correspondence with her after reading some of her poetry, and they were apparently quite happy together until his death.

In an article titled “The Milwaukee School of Fleshly Poetry: Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s Poems of Passion and Popular Aestheticism,” Angela Sorby includes excerpts from the pre-marriage correspondence between Ella and Robert. It appears that, like some of Ella’s other critics, Robert concluded that her sensuous images in some poetry marked her as a loose woman, and one who might entertain a sexual relationship with him. He refers to an affair he is currently engaged in and asks Ella for “a sort of comradeship that would be more pleasant and durable even than friendship,”¹¹ Ella correctly divines his intentions, and explains that she is not puritanical, but “very liberal—though not as liberal as you had hoped.” She offers not the sort of comradeship he is seeking, but the opportunity to be a “companionable friend.” Ultimately, as already noted, she does marry him.

COMPARISONS TO SWINBURNE AND WHITMAN

As noted above, early criticism of the draft of Poems of Passion loudly proclaimed her to have gone beyond the apparently objectionable characteristics of two male poets, English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne and American poet Walt Whitman.

All three poets have biographical sketches on the Poetry Foundation’s website. Swinburne’s biography notes his birth into a wealthy English family, and his educational background, before describing him as follows:

Swinburne was one of the most accomplished lyric poets of the Victorian era and was a preeminent symbol of rebellion against the conservative values of his time.

The biography goes on to describe his most important collection of poems as having “explicit and often pathological sexual themes” which became the “dominant feature of Swinburne’s image.”¹²

Whitman is described by the Poetry Foundation as “America’s world poet—a latter day successor to Homer, Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare.”¹³ Much of his most famous poetry celebrated the developing nation that the United States was, at a time when the measure of poetry was still European, something we have forgotten from what I see as our current self-perception of leading the world in the arts. I suspect we studied him somewhere along the line in primary or secondary school, and I found him more accessible than Eliot.

The Poetry Foundation biography indicates that “According to the Longman Anthology of Poetry, ‘Whitman received little public acclaim for his poems during his lifetime for several reasons: this openness regarding sex, his self-presentation as a rough working-man, and his stylistic innovations.”

In the article first noted above, “The Milwaukee School of Fleshly Poetry: Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s Poems of Passion and Popular Aestheticism,” Angela Sorby of Marquette University centers her discussion of Ella Wheeler Wilcox around the reaction to Poems of Passion.¹⁴ Sorby sees Wilcox as promoting a form of consumerism along with her sensuous images. As with Eliot’s essays of literary criticism, I cannot say I really understand her arguments, but here is one relevant passage:

For Wilcox, the location of middle-class pleasure is the body: it is the portable property that can . . . both express consuming desires and fulfill them. This leads her to frame love in terms of private property, even in a poem titled “Communism” that describes a bloody “revolution” in which the speaker’s feelings overwhelm her common sense.

As noted in the article’s title, Sorby also sees Ella as an example of the school of Aestheticism, which was based around the idea that art could be made purely for art’s sake and enjoyment of that art, rather than simply for moralizing or teaching purposes. Sorby sees both Ella and Swinburne as examples of Aestheticism, but clearly the biggest commonality for the two poets is their straying into imagery considered erotic and thus sinful. Sorby notes that the class differences between the two meant that Swinburne, born into wealth, educational opportunities and privilege, had “cultural capital to burn, and his poems. . . were read in the context of his decadently aristocratic life.” Contrariwise, Ella was a middle-class Midwesterner at a time when, in American society, Sorby says that accepted values were “policed by a properly educated eastern establishment.”

Ella herself noted her own first real realization of the influence class and status had in America in her description of her one semester studying at Madison University:

I was not at all happy there: first, because I knew the strain it put upon the home purse; second because I felt the gulf between myself and the town girls, whose gowns and privileges revealed to me, for the first time, the different classes in American social life; and third, because I wanted to write and did not want to study.¹⁵

Ella convinced her family to let her come home to write after that first semester, and so, she never acquired the formal education that a poet like Swinburne was exposed to as a matter of wealth and privilege.

I don’t feel that Sorby explicitly notes what might be one of the chief reasons for a different response to Ella versus Swinburne, and Whitman. Even at the time at which all three poets were actively receiving criticism for their sexual images, it must have been far easier to overlook the culturally expected sensual feelings and urges of men, as noted in my previous post on the Cult of True Womanhood. I suspect critics could accept a man of class being what they saw as immoral, while a middle class midwestern woman without significant means engaging in something deemed as similar was a scandal.

However, I suspect that Ella’s fame and ubiquity allowed girls and women, especially those from the unlettered, unfashionable Midwest to believe that any sensual feelings were normal and shared by other women. Even more, I like to believe that Ella’s greatest influence was that she made women and girls believe that they could have an independent career. After the severe trashing she received in response to her first attempts at publishing Poems of Passion, she did not retreat into domesticity but went on until the book was published.

If anything, Ella herself deemed some of her readers to underplay the amount of sheer tenacity she had continuously practiced on her way to success and fame. She describes letters asking her to intercede with publishers or show the letter writer the supposed path to publication. She declares:

Eastern editors are on the lookout for new talent constantly, and if a writer possesses it, together with perseverance, he will succeed, whether he lives in the Western desert or in the metropolis, and without any friend at court.¹⁶

ELLA AND THEODOSIA

Following the publication of Poems of Passion, Ella enjoyed enough financial success that she (and her husband) were able to purchase property in the Short Beach neighborhood of Branford, Connecticut. There they built two homes two adjacent homes where they spent most of the year, first a “summer” home which they called “The Bungalow,” and later another home, to which they moved each winter, called “The Barracks.”¹⁷ Ella and Robert are credited with making Short Beach popular, and their homes were known as gathering spaces for “the literary and artistic figures of the day.” One of the people hosted by Ella and Robert was another poet, Theodosia Pickering Garrison, mentioned above in my brief introduction to the summer of 1914, the “Summer of Writers,” around which this post is organized.

Some years after Ella’s short autobiography commissioned by Cosmopolitan and published in their pages, a publishing house apparently owned by Cosmopolitan published a much longer autobiography called The Worlds and I. In it, she gives us some details about Garrison:

First as a girl, then as the wife of a man who became a helpless invalid, then as a fascinating widow, and now as the happiest wife on earth, she, who is known to the public as Theodosia Garrison, has been my guest and friend during all the wonderful years since first we met. Her poetical gifts were so natural and spontaneous that she did not at first realize their importance—as a child might pluck and play with rare orchids, unconscious of their value; but gradually the meaning of the gift God had bestowed upon her grew into her understanding, and with each year her talents ripened. I know of no other poet in America possessed of a more lyrical power of expression.¹⁸

Ella describes “golden summer hours” when she and Garrison sat in the same room at different desks writing poems, and taking turns reading their work to each other, for “honest criticism.”

1914: A BANNER YEAR FOR THREE WRITERS

I have already told you a considerable amount about Ella, so I will give you some details about the other two writers who Anna Molloy Walsh indicated stayed at the Glenside Park resort during the summer of 1914.

At the time of her 1914 visit to Glenside Park, Theodosia Pickering Garrison was married to a Newark, NJ attorney named Frederick Faulks. She had been born in Newark but was “raised and educated in private schools in New York.”¹⁹ She worked on the staff of Life magazine, and contributed to other magazines, including Scribner’s, “usually writing poetry reviews.” She published several volumes of her own poetry, and had her poetry anthologized in A Treasury of War Poems 1914—1919. Additionally, she helped organize events for the 250^th Anniversary of Newark and was one of the judges for a poetry contest held as part of the Anniversary.

In 1914, she entertained Ella as a houseguest in a rented vacation cottage at Glenside Park, returning the favor of Ella, who had hosted her at Short Beach on a number of occasions. Also in 1914, Garrison was reported as being listed in the Who’s Who,²⁰ which all the brief biographical sketches seem to especially celebrate.

The third writer visiting Glenside during the summer of 1914 was Paul Clarenden West. Anna characterizes him more as a cartoonist than a newspaperman; he actually was far more versatile than that, composing music, writing stories and plays. Anna remembers him for the newspaper cartoon which he wrote and illustrated—“Bill the Office Boy”—whose various story installments, that same year in 1914, were beginning to be made into short films by Komic Comedies, a subsidiary of Mutual Film Company, best known for producing Charlie Chaplin films. These films were produced by Edward Dillon, a well-known actor and producer.²¹ West was, therefore, the only one of the three who was not a poet.

West wrote a number of screenplays, including for the adaptations of his “Bill the Office Boy” stories, and also wrote a children’s book entitled The Pearl and the Pumpkin, which was illustrated by W.W. Denslow, the illustrator who had previously illustrated some of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. Indeed, West adapted at least one of Baum’s books as a screenplay. West also wrote many songs and musical scores.

Anna also remembered that West later went to France to do war relief work during World War I with the Red Cross, and died there (apparently a suicide, because of poor health resulting from being gassed on the battlefield while helping).

ELLA’S BIG 1914 AND A LOST THEATER

Thus, 1914 was the year Garrison made the Who’s Who and West first saw films being produced from one of his most well-known series of cartoons, a good year for both. But it was an especially massive year for Ella.

Ella’s poem “The Price He Paid,” set forth above, was the inspiration for a movie of the same name, which was released in December 1914. This was the first of a number of movies based on her poems, and produced by Keystone Dramatic Company.

A quick detour: as I did newspaper research, concentrating on New Jersey newspapers on Ella for the year 1914, I found an advertisement for the movie’s opening—apparently for the only theater where it opened in New Jersey. The theater was in Asbury Park, and was called the Hippodrome, possibly after a more famous theater of that name in New York City, which billed itself as the largest theater in the world, and operated from 1905 to 1939. When I first used Google to ask about the Hippodrome in Asbury Park, its AI summary insisted that there never was any such theater. Further newspaper research demonstrated that there indeed was a Hippodrome in Asbury Park, which operated at least through the years I searched, from 1910 to 1915, and during that time, underwent at least one ownership change and two major renovations, which fitted the theater out to be the venue not only for movies such as “The Price He Paid,” but for an amazing range of other events, including a circus, a wrestling match, and a laughter fest. A rabbit hole of research to be sure, providing a fun and interesting example of lost history, even more lost than Ella herself.

Back to Ella, then. During the year 1914 (not all during the summer of 1914, to be sure), in addition to seeing her first movie appear, Ella enjoyed a number of other often quirky indicators of renown.

On August 16, 1914, the Newark Sunday Call, on a page with the heading “Topics for Women Worth Reading,” had a five photograph series across the top of the page, with the title “Photographs Show How Girls Spoil Their Beauty by Face Contortions.”²² Directly under the photo series, on the far left, is a short article titled “’Warm Heart Keeps Face Young,’ Says Ella Wheeler Wilcox.” The article consists largely of quotes from Ella’s “just published ‘The Art of Being Alive: Success Through Thought,” which was a book of self-help based around the notion of remaining positive, self-confident, and persistent in order to be happy. Here are some of the quotes contained in the newspaper article:

In every thousand people who are living on this earth not more than one is alive. To be really alive means more than to be a moving, breathing, eating, drinking and talking human creature.

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The man or woman who achieves great things in the mental world and who neglects the body, the health, the personal appearance, can not live life to its fullest—or perfection.

Also during 1914, Ella, who was known to be an accomplished and avid dancer, had a new dance, the “Wilcox Glide,” named after her by her dance instructor, Miss Jane Beers.²³

Ella was also part of a religious movement called “New Thought,” and apparently believed in such things as reincarnation. In 1914, she is named as a friend of a woman accused of an improper relationship with Frank W. Sears, who was, according to the newspaper, the leader of the New Th ought movement and a “mental healer,” and who claimed that while he might be seen as married under the laws of man, he did not see himself married under the laws of God.²⁴

Also during 1914, Ella pleaded (apparently unsuccessfully) before the New Jersey State Board of Pardons on behalf of “an East Haven lifer.”²⁵

And in a 1914 article quoting heavily from an address given by Dr. Francis Rolt-Wheeler on the topic of “The American Lyric Poets of the Twentieth Century” to a social gathering of the Teachers’ Mutual Aid Association, apparently along with members of the Women’s Club as well as high school and grammar school graduates, both Ella and Garrison were singled out as noteworthy.²⁶ Rolt-Wheeler said:

For purposes of easy classification, I have divided the forms of lyric poetry into seven great classes. This division is in no sense conventional nor orthodox, yet I feel that in making such a division it posseses a poignancy that is suitable for remembrance. These schools are: Realism, Classicism, Emotionalism, Romanticism, Symbolism, Aestheticism and Impressionism.

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Classicism is of all words descriptive of lyric poetry the most ill-used. If the term be intended only to describe antiquity, it should be so stated; if the term be used to suggest unique value, it should be set aside for that purpose; if it be intended to imply a chaste simplicity, a final adjustments of means to ends, a proportion and symmetry, rather than a fantastic abundance, than it possesses value. The truer classicism which I have defined as the dominance of reason in verse finds its greatest exemplars in Percy MacKale, Edwin Markham and Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

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Theodosia Garrison has perhaps achieved the greatest distinction of the American lyric poets in the field of emotionalism.

More literary criticism, to join that of Eliot and others earlier in the post! And a reinforcement of the notion both Ella and Garrison were enjoying a year of special recognition.

Each of the three writers was enjoying acclaim for their work when they got together in a quiet New Jersey resort. I like to imagine Paul West giving Ella Wheeler Wilcox advice on her impending movie opening. I like to imagine Ella and Theodosia Garrison reading their works to each other on the lovely Adirondack-style porches.

WHAT’S UP NEXT

Each of my posts in the series on the resort period of the Deserted Village renamed Glenside Park have only served to indicate that there is always infinite possibility for historic research on each of the topic areas discussed. I have been constantly amazed at the directions the research leads.

For now, I will leave off the resort period, although my next post will be something of a recap of the entire resort series; a sort of road map showing the threads which weave through all the series posts.

Until then!

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