Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/238

 May, 1883, there was published at Chicago a thin little volume containing about fifty poems of very second-rate quality which, in the ordinary course of events, would have quickly dropped from sight and been forgotten. But some adroit advertising, combined with an astounding absence of humor on the part of certain editors and reviewers, changed all that, and this little book not only made a great splash in the literary mill-pond, but convinced many Americans for all time that its author was an abandoned creature, a slave to passions quite oriental in their character, and the heroine of various torrid love adventures.

The book bore the daring title Poems of Passion, but its author, far from being an adventuress, was a little Wisconsin girl named Ella Wheeler, the daughter of a poor farmer, who had lived all her life in the cramped environment of a tiny hamlet called Johnson Centre, whose knowledge of the world was bounded by a few short visits to Madison and Milwaukee, and whose acquaintance with literature was confined to the menus furnished by the New York Mercury and the New York