Famous Single Poems
A Checkered Life, written, so Mrs. Wilcox afterwards asserted, while Joyce was serving a term in prison for complicity in certain whisky frauds. The book purported to tell the story of Joyce’s career from youth to maturity, and included the following remarkable memorandum:
Eastern Kentucky Lunatic Asylum,
Lexington, Kentucky.
The records of this asylum show No. 2,423, John A. Joyce, 18 years of age; occupation, farmer; habit, temperate; original disposition and intellect good; cause, heredity; form of mania, perpetual motion. Admitted June 20, 1860; discharged September, 1860.
W. A. Bullock, M. D.
Medical Superintendent.
This memorandum was supposed to prove that Joyce had entirely recovered from the mental trouble which had clouded his youth.
At the back of the book were twenty-three extremely mediocre poems, supposedly all that he had ever written.
In 1885 another edition of the book was published with some additions and revisions, and one of the additions was the poem, “Laugh and the World Laughs with You.” Ten years later Joyce published another book entitled Jewels of Memory, also including a number of his poems, “Laugh and the World Laughs with
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