Novelist as poet, essential moderns

University presses are one of the very few places publishing poetry these days, and they often offer fine books of poems. But often too universities have vested interests in turning out relatively unobjectionable manuscripts and mediocrity becomes the name of the game. It is therefore quite happily that I inform the reader of three fine volumes of poetry, which come from sources independent of academia, that will be valued additions to your poetry shelf.

The first is one of the latest offerings from The American Poets Project. In Edith Wharton: Selected Poems (Library of America, $20, 200 pages), the novelist Louis Auchincloss reintroduces us to Wharton’s poetical works. Much better known for her prose works — “The Age of Innocence,” for instance — it is clear that Wharton’s poetry anticipates much of the subsequent modern period in its themes and subtlety. In “Some Woman to Some Man” there are foreshadowings of the wry and caustic observations of Dorothy Parker, and also of the melancholic theme of Robert Frost’s “Road Less Taken.”

We might have loved each

other after all,

Have lived and learned

together! Yet I doubt it;

You asked, I think, too

great a sacrifice,

Or else, perhaps, I rate

myself too dear.

Whichever way the

difference lies between us,

Would common cares have

helped to lessen it,

Story Continues →