Art & Creativity Quote by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Wilcox is taking a polite knife to the Gilded Age cult of refinement: the parlor-room belief that the right diction, the right manners, the right rhetorical satin finish can carry a thought into immortality. Her target is not craft itself but craft as camouflage. You can "choose your words like a connoisseur" - an image that flatters taste-making, suggests leisure, and quietly mocks the class performance behind "good writing". "Polish it up with art" sharpens the point: technique can make language gleam, but gleam is not heat.

The engine of the stanza is its pivot from aesthetic pleasure to bodily effect. "Sways, and stirs, and stays" moves in a simple escalation: persuasion, emotion, memory. The line is built to be remembered because it describes memory; it’s a mnemonic about mnemonics. Wilcox’s subtext is almost populist: audiences are not won by linguistic gatekeeping but by felt sincerity. That message mattered in an era when elocution, etiquette, and literary taste were bound up with social rank, and when mass print culture was expanding the market for accessible, inspirational verse.

Still, she’s savvy enough to smuggle artistry into her argument. The poem is meticulously rhymed and rhythmically clean; the "heart" she champions arrives on a carefully engineered beat. The intent, then, is double: to authorize emotion as a legitimate form of authority, and to remind writers that authenticity is not the opposite of technique - it’s what technique is for.