3 quotations linked to Poems of Optimism by or associated with Ella Wheeler Wilcox, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
Optimism, purpose, beauty, peace, resilience, social conscience and spiritual-aesthetic reflection.
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“Autumn spoke loudly of the beautiful.”
Wilcox treats autumn itself as an emphatic expression of beauty, using seasonal color and change as evidence for attentive aesthetic appreciation.
Source note: Poems of Optimism, “Beauty”; Project Gutenberg #7421. The surrounding stanza describes autumn forests as a gallery of vivid colors; the line is poetic and devotional observation, not a scientific claim about aesthetic value.
“Lo! I have found the world is very fair.”
The declaration concludes a deliberate search for beauty by affirming that close attention has revealed much in the world worth valuing.
Source note: Poems of Optimism, “Beauty”; Project Gutenberg #7421. The surrounding poem is explicitly religious and aesthetic, repeatedly connecting beauty with God, stars, sunsets and ordinary perception.
“’Tis the set of the soul that decides its goal and not the calm or the strife.”
The nautical metaphor places direction in the stance a person adopts toward conditions, arguing that purpose can survive both ease and adversity.
Source note: Poems of Optimism, “The Winds of Fate,” first published in this collection in 1913; Project Gutenberg #7421. The statement is metaphorical poetry about agency, not a denial of material constraints or unequal circumstances.