Famous Single Poems
make some money, offered to publish the book and brought it out with great éclat. He sent review copies, no doubt with cleverly worded blurbs, to various guardians of public morals, and then sat back and waited results.
They were not long in coming. A terrific cyclone of public indignation burst about the author’s head. Her friends turned away from her in disapproval, and many of them expressed the opinion that she should have waited until she was dead, or at least married, before permitting the poems to appear, since they dealt with matters with which no decent girl could possibly be familiar. Charles A. Dana devoted two sizzling columns to a sweeping condemnation of the book which, he announced, threatened to undermine all morality and should be suppressed. The Chicago Herald, after pointing out the poisonous character of the book’s contents, ventured the hope “that Miss Ella Wheeler will relapse into Poems of Decency now that the New York Sun has voiced the opinion of respectability that her Poems of Passion are like the songs of half-tipsy wantons.” Nowhere was a voice raised in her defense.
The most embarrassing feature of the situation was that she had just become engaged to be married to a man who, as it turned out, was to be her lifelong lover and husband; but she dared not announce the engagement for fear of the
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