Selected Poems of Edith Wharton ed. by Irene Goldman-Price (review)

That Wharton wrote and published poetry has long been known. Her bibliography includes three volumes of poems; all of her biographers mention her poetry, and critics have, at least on occasion, discussed it. Further, a volume including many of her poems, Edith Wharton: Selected Poems, edited by Louis Auchincloss, has been available since 2005. Yet Wharton's work as a poet has received little attention from either literary critics or general readers. Selected Poems of Edith Wharton, edited by Irene Goldman-Price and published by Scribner in July 2019, will change this unfortunate situation, establishing both the importance of Wharton as a poet and the importance of poetry to Wharton as a writer and an individual.

As Goldman-Price's fine introduction to the volume establishes, poetry writing was integral to Wharton throughout her lifetime. Her very first publication, at the age of seventeen, was the poem "Only a Child," written to protest the death of a boy in an institution for homeless children and published under the pen name "Eadgyth"; her last volume of poetry, Twelve Poems, was published in 1926, when she was sixty-two, and she continued to write poetry through the year of her death. She was, moreover, a highly skilled poet; this volume—which includes over a hundred and thirty poems, fifty of them never before in print—will leave no doubt of that. Indeed, Selected Poems makes me wonder why Wharton's poetry has been so neglected by the vast majority of Wharton scholars (generally including myself), and wonder whether this is partly due to the training most doctoral students receive, as they often specialize not only in a theoretical approach but in a specific genre or limited range of genres, leaving other genres untouched. Wharton is so famed as a fiction writer—and increasingly as a writer of nonfiction and even drama—that those working in these genres have perhaps been unlikely to look at her work as a poet, even as scholars specializing in poetry may well be unaware of her work in the genre. But the days in which Wharton's work as a poet have been overlooked should soon be left behind.

Certainly the editing and organization of Selected Poems of Edith Wharton will attract both scholars and general readers. Goldman-Price includes a relatively brief but insightful introduction, which is extremely helpful in orienting the reader to Wharton's work as a poet. The overall organization of the volume is also inviting. In contrast to Auchincloss's volume, which presents the poems in the order of book publication, Goldman-Price has organized the poems into eight thoughtfully chosen groups, ranging from "Landscapes of the Imagination," through "Courtship, Love, and Heartbreak," to a fine selection of dramatic monologues in "Arresting Characters"; the book's final grouping is, appropriately, "On Death and a Philosophy of Life." Within sections, poems are generally ordered chronologically; Goldman-Price includes both composition and publication dates, a boon to the scholar.

In addition to the general introduction to the volume, Goldman-Price introduces each group of poems; she also provides prefatory notes to individual poems offering useful, necessary, and interesting contexts. For the dramatic monologue "Margaret of Cortona," for instance, the reader finds out not only that the title character was a Tuscan saint, but that the publication of the poem—in which Wharton imagines Margaret on her deathbed, musing not on heavenly matters but on her long-since-murdered lover—so shocked some Catholic readers that the magazine that had published it apologized to its readers in a later issue (149). As a physical object, Selected Poems of Edith Wharton is a more inviting book than Auchincloss's small 2005 volume, drawing readers into the world of Wharton's poetry with a well-chosen layout, including print size and generous margins reminiscent of the period in which Wharton's own books were originally published. The volume also includes several attractive, intriguing, and informative illustrations. "Margaret of Cortona," for instance...