Edith Wharton’s Poetry
Wharton Beyond the Novel
Best known today as a novelist, Edith Wharton was also an accomplished poet. When she was eighteen, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow read her poems and arranged to have five published in The Atlantic Monthly. Wharton continued writing, and publishing, poetry throughout her life, often expressing her deepest feelings in verse.
Meet our Reader
The poems featured were selected by our reader, Irene Goldman-Price, the editor of My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann (Yale 2012) and, most recently, Selected Poems of Edith Wharton (Scribner 2019).