The Age of the Motored Things

LibriVox volunteers bring you 13 recordings of The Age of the Motored Things by Ella Wheeler Wilcox. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for October 6, 2013. Ella Wheeler Wilcox was an American author and poet. Her best-known work was Poems of Passion. Her most enduring work was ” Solitude”, which contains the lines: “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone”. Her autobiography, The Worlds and I, was published in 1918, a year before her death. A popular poet rather than a literary poet, in her poems she expresses sentiments of cheer and optimism in plainly written, rhyming verse. Her world view is expressed in the title of her poem “Whatever Is?Is Best”. None of Wilcox’s works were included by F. O. Matthiessen in The Oxford Book of American Verse, but Hazel Felleman chose no fewer than fourteen of her poems for Best Loved Poems of the American People, while Martin Gardner selected “Solitude” and “The Winds of Fate” for Best Remembered Poems. (Summary from Wikipedia)