I’m not sure at what point the characters in Edith Wharton’s novels began to speak to me as if we were corresponding across many decades. Or at what point I realized that distance was in many ways more imagined than real, as I began to see and sense echoes of that period everywhere — in the widening gulf between rich and poor, in attitudes toward those coming to America to work and raise families, in an expansion of technology so rapid that it strained the social fabric and invigorated some while bewildering others. I just know that at some point, I began to hear the voices in all their tone and nuance and subtext, and to sense the flesh-and-blood persons behind them, with their aspirations and fears and complex relationships.
So as a writer, it just made good sense to accept the gift — a second harvest of the gift already present in “The Age of Innocence” and “Old New York” and the wonderfully, insatiably self-regarding Undine Sprague of “The Custom of the Country” — and begin to record the voices I was hearing.
She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them. – Edith Wharton, “The Custom of the Country”
And the letter form for the poems felt natural, inspired by the epistolary parts of Ellen Bryan Voigt’s “Kyrie,” which delves into the great and terrible flu pandemic of 1918. Many of the poems were written in five days at The Porches, a writers retreat in Virginia, in an unprecedented spell of productivity. Not only that, but the writing was, for once, fun and unforced. The only check on the flow of words was the time spent doing the historical research to provide the proper setting for the characters I was discovering daily, a setting that, as no more or less than the Gilded Age itself, is the true main character of the collection. Realizing that the amount of historical detail could check the flow for the reader as well, I added a set of historical notes at the back of the manuscript to hopefully prevent the wealth of detail from becoming too burdensome.
To balance the letters and provide contrast, I interspersed some lyric riffs on postcards from the time period that I found in Leonard Pitt’s wonderful “Paris Postcards: The Golden Age,” I discovered from the text that postcards were the Instagram of the time: In 1903, England posted 613 million postcards, Germany over one billion, and the US nearly 800 million.
I hope readers of this unassuming set of poems, which hints at but does not directly address the socioeconomic and cultural disparities of the period, will enjoy getting to know, just a bit, the people behind the voices I’ve channeled. While also finding echoes of that tumultuous time in the present. There is a reason Mark Twain chose "gilded” to describe the age he saw emerging around him, a time of substantial and growing inequality masked by a veneer of magnificence.
I also hope that anyone who enjoys the poems will seek out the novels that inspired it, as well as those of Willa Cather, who is present here as well, mainly in the poems at the end of the book from WWI, when magnificence and faith in limitless progress ended in the horrors of trench warfare.
Anyone wishing to learn more about the gilded age can do so by viewing the PBS documentary The Gilded Age, which aired the month after “Voices from the First Gilded Age” was completed: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/gilded-age/
I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that the period between reconstruction and WWI is now reasserting itself in the American imagination. Of course, the comparison is in many ways a kind of superficial shorthand, as this essay attempts to explain: https://www.vox.com/first-person/2019/4/1/18286084/gilded-age-income-inequality-robber-baron
Pitt’s book of postcards reproduces a Paris largely displaced by the modernism of the 1960’s and 70’s, and is well worth the time to explore: https://www.amazon.com/Paris-Postcards-Golden-Leonard-Pitt/dp/144565587X/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Leonard+Pitt+Paris+Postcards&qid=1565706936&s=gateway&sr=8-1
Oh, and if you’re interested in ordering my chapbook, you can do so here: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/voices-from-the-first-gilded-age-by-ed-granger/