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...
