A Teacher
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Optimism, the creative power of thought and mood, expressed through popular verse
The transmission
Ella Wheeler Wilcox (5 November 1850 - 30 October 1919) was an American poet and author, born in Johnstown, Wisconsin, who became one of the most widely read versifiers of her age.
Enormously popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she reached a mass audience through newspapers and gift-book volumes such as Poems of Passion (1883) and Poems of Optimism (1919).
Her most enduring lines - “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; / Weep, and you weep alone,” from the poem “Solitude” - entered common speech, and her affirming maxim “Whatever is, is best” captured the buoyant fatalism many readers took as consolation.
Wilcox was an avowed adherent of New Thought as well as of Theosophy and Spiritualism, and her verse became a popular conduit for the movement’s optimism: the conviction that mood and thought are creative, that the cheerful mind draws good to itself, and that the world answers the spirit one brings to it.
More than a doctrinal teacher, she functioned as the tradition’s poet-popularizer, embedding mind-power optimism in memorable, quotable lines that carried the ideas far beyond the lecture halls and metaphysical churches.
What they gave
Poet of New Thought optimism: rendered the movement’s core mood - that thought and cheerfulness are creative forces - in widely memorized verse.
- Memetic reach: through phrases like “Laugh, and the world laughs with you,” she spread mind-power sensibility into everyday quotation and popular culture.
- Affirmative philosophy in verse: her “Whatever is, is best” and similar lines modeled the optimistic, acceptance-and-attraction stance of the tradition.
- Mass-audience bridge: carried metaphysical optimism to a general readership far larger than New Thought’s organized membership.
In their words
There is no chance, no destiny, no fate, Can circumvent or hinder or control The firm resolve of a determined soul.
One ship drives east and another drives west, With the self-same winds that blow, ’Tis the set of the sails And not the gales That tell them the way to go.
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.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: the New Thought movement; Theosophy and Spiritualism; the American tradition of optimistic popular verse.
- Influenced: popular New Thought culture; the broader optimism and positive-thinking stream; the genre of inspirational verse and quotation.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- Poems of Passion1883
- The Heart of the New Thought1902