Freedom, Truth and Beauty: Sonnets

The quality of Edward Doyle's work was appraised by Ella Wheeler Wilcox in the following article by Mrs. Wilcox which appeared in the New York Evening Journal and the San Francisco Examiner, in 1905:

Shut your eyes and bind them with a black cloth and try for one hour to see how cheerful you can be. Then imagine yourself deprived for life of the light of day.

Perhaps this experiment will make you less rebellious with your present lot.

Then take the little book called "The Haunted Temple and Other Poems," by Edward Doyle, the blind poet of Harlem, and read and wonder and feel ashamed of any mood of distrust of God and discontent with life you have ever indulged.

Mr. Doyle has been blind for the last thirty-seven years; he has lived a half century.

Therefore he still remembers the privilege of seeing God's world when a lad, and this must augment rather than ameliorate his sorrow.

He who has never known the use of eyes cannot fully understand the immensity of the loss of sight.

I hear people in possession of all their senses, and with many blessings, bewail the fact that they were ever born.

They have missed some aim, failed of some cherished ambition, lost some special joy or been defeated in some purpose.