Do you remember when we kissed under the trees near the shore in the moonlight?
Time does not take things away. It preserves. It records. Time is the net of memory.
For years I felt sorry for myself, thinking every day
time took things away.
But time is the opposite. It holds things forever and never lets them go.
Time is vernacular. It is neither fast nor slow.
Time is the casual waist and wrist. The look which says, “I know.”
Time is comfortable and easy. Time will always be here.
My life fading away was always my greatest fear.
Sentimental and sad, I viewed time the wrong way.
Time preserves. Nothing is taken away.
Light will see the light again.
Time knows we never forget.
Time is not an arrow or a train.
Time is the binding rain.
Time will face you next to her yet.
You will kiss her by the beach again
under those same trees.
Tell this poem to tell her, please.
Scarriet 
noochinator said,
August 23, 2024 at 8:53 am
Joseph Epstein just released his autobiography, and there’s some funny stuff in there. Quoth the Myron (his birth name is Myron Joseph Epstein):
[My father’s] own best wit entailed a comic resignation. In his late eighties, he made the mistake of sending to a great-nephew, whom he had never met, a bar mitzvah gift check for $1,000, instead of the $100 he had intended, When I discovered the error while going over his checkbook and pointed it out to him, he paused only briefly, smiled, and said, “Boy, is his younger brother going to be disappointed.” At a certain point late in his business life he became intent on collecting even rather small debts owed him by deadbeat customers. “It’s not the principle,” he said. “It’s the money.”
[My father] gave large sums to Jewish charities, and at one point put upon the wall of his den a plaque from the Israel Bonds Office in Chicago that read “Morese Epstein, $25,000 Donor.” When I pointed out that they had misspelled his first name of Maurice, he replied, “You can’t really expect them to spell your name correctly for less than a hundred-thousand-dollar donation.”
Epstein recounts this joke about a Jew from a shtetl who visits Warsaw and upon return tells his friend of the wonders he had seen:
“I met a Jew who had grown up in a yeshiva and knew large portions off the Talmud by heart. I met a Jew who was an atheist. I met a Jew who owned a large clothing store with many employees, and I met a Jew who was an ardent communist.”
“What’s so strange?” his friend askes. “Warsaw is a big city. Nearly a million Jews live there.”
“You don’t understand,” the man answers, “it was the same Jew.”
noochinator said,
August 23, 2024 at 7:55 pm
The trouble with Delmore
byWilliam Logan
On The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz edited by Ben Mazer.
Delmore Schwartz is a haunting reminder of the travails—or roller-coaster rides—of reputation. He burst onto the literary scene in 1938, some years before his peers, with the poems, verse play, and short story of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938). The reactions were all a poet could wish for. Allen Tate wrote Schwartz before publication that his “poetic style is . . . the first real innovation that we’ve had since Eliot and Pound,” and Wallace Stevens something similarly head-turning. (In a letter two years later, however, the great panjandrum of Hartford wrote a friend that Schwartz “is extremely keen: perhaps too keen.”)
Among the critics, Mark Van Doren in The Kenyon Review called the book “as good as any poetry has been for . . . at least a literary generation,” while R. P. Blackmur in Partisan Review remarked somewhat less rapturously that
Mr. Schwartz has spontaneity, the gift of speech, together with that slant, that deep inclination, towards maturity, which has not yet saved him from that glibness which is lack of subject matter. We see him resort to the artifice of getting under way, no matter where, and accepting whatever wind or spirit proposes. . . . Mr. Schwartz has not mastered his peculiar form; it is not everywhere equal to the demands of his sensibility, nor does it always seem able to possess itself of a subject-matter.
Schwartz was a prodigy of logrolling—despite the downpour of praise, many reviews were the gifts of literary friends.
Very few young poets could fail to have their heads turned by such a consoling chorus. In The Nation, Louise Bogan, an underrated critic who made a very funny scold, stood among the dissenters:
If Pound has siphoned off poetry from all periods, if Eliot has presented “the fragments shored against my ruins,” there’s nothing to stop their junior contemporaries from doing the same. . . . There are [in Schwartz’s lyrics] the tiger, Christ, and the Kafka-Auden-Isherwood Dog, a monocle and some ice cream from W. Stevens, playing cards from Eliot, and Anglo-Saxon monosyllables from Molly Bloom. Mention of these things should not be taken as the sneer of middle-aged criticism; they are mentioned in order to indicate how difficult it is, under the circumstances peculiar to our post-Eliot literature, to get down to the young writer: to hear, in this instance, something of Delmore Schwartz.
(Bogan was hardly perfect, mistaking the dedication of one untitled lyric, “For Rhoda,” as the title.) The poetry of In Dreams, unlike later work, is less filled with the clatter of Schwartz’s private reading and his scatty education at Columbia, Wisconsin, NYU, and Harvard. Logrolled or not, the reviews fed his grandiose estimate of his own gifts—an estimate that, to be fair, would probably not have been much dented had all the reviews been caustic.
In Dreams opens with Schwartz’s most famous (and probably finest) short story, which provided the title of the book. There follows a darkly intelligent but crackpot take on Coriolanus, refigured in Freudian fashion as Coriolanus and His Mother: The Dream of One Performance (A Narrative Poem). Though this overbearing work extends to some twenty-five hundred lines, I admire Schwartz’s chutzpah in challenging Shakespeare at the outset of a career littered with projects of near hopeless difficulty. You see immediately the young man’s instinct for setting a scene, viewing dramatic matters through a microscope, and shifting his attention without being tiresome. The poem begins,
Theatre, the place to stare, rustle of programs,
Many have come, are being seated. The house
Is full, the audience is distinguished,
And in a box-seat sit five ghosts, and one,
A boy with guttural voice full of emotion.
Schwartz’s superb confidence attracted the reviewers, though too many longed to cheer on this fresh-faced enfant terrible. Even so, when iambic pentameter was almost as natural as breathing for American poets, schooled in it despite the free verse of the Moderns, why the odd slippage in the third line of that quote or a similar stumble in the second line of a passage nearby?
Rome, Rome,
The history-ridden arena shown by
A temple painted on a canvas backdrop;
On fluted columns, fat and white, there rests
The pediment wherein a writhing frieze
Of armed men strain to kill the other team
World without end, word without end of hatred.
Recall that most Moderns could write virtuoso pentameter when they wished. The little hitches in meter are one thing; but the “other team” is a tone-deaf, snotty-schoolboy metaphor that drops out of nowhere. What Schwartz lacked was the ability to manage himself or see his work with any detachment—there’s little he tried to sell he didn’t oversell. (W. H. Auden apparently thought the poetry “could use a little more ego and a little less id.”) When Schwartz lets his characters yammer away, as some do incessantly, you imagine they’re being paid by the word. They caterwaul until you want to jump onstage and choke them to death. A long poem can stand only so much babble.
If this flawed poem possesses flashes of insight and stretches of unusual poetic language, hundreds of lines put paid to the idea that Schwartz was a poetic genius. He’ll write a striking phrase, then bury it in a pile of sludge:
The state, that knot of common weakness,
Consistent need, poor fear, and aching will,
Becomes an animal or organism
Wherein each organ must deny itself
That the great corpse may be well-fed.
“How metaphors may serve the ruling class,
Hypostasis itself shall soothe the poor!”
Schwartz lost me long before “hypostasis” wriggled in. (The ideas, if you can sit still for them, are sometimes better than the language—but more often far worse.) Such lines seem composed by a wise old sledgehammer for the benefit of infant sledgehammers.
Consider one of the stronger passages in this long-winded poem:
A new scene. On a side street. Twilight
Blackens the roof-tops. Brutus and his fellow,
The voices of the poor, confer in whispers,
Old in analysis the soul of Marcius,
Surd irreducible, a glittering diamond,
Unpurchased by their tactic or their smile,
Occult to them.
“Surd irreducible” is a bit much. An irrational number or quantity (pre-Shakespearean in origin, though Shakespeare never used it), “surd” happens to be one of Schwartz’s favorite words.
Or try to swallow lines like
This would delight me O much more than when
In the ecstasy of the darkness I conceived,
Moved by the thrusting self-delighting spoon
Which made my son, my spear.
“The thrusting self-delighting spoon”? (A type of medieval polearm was called a Bohemian earspoon, but it’s by no means clear what the poet is after.) Could Schwartz have held his worst instincts in check, he might have worked his way out of his early flirtation with rhetoric for rhetoric’s sake. Lowell certainly managed to, and Berryman eventually discovered a Berryman rhetoric in a funhouse version of American colloquial.
Reviewers seemed to admire Schwartz’s ambition without noticing that the poetry was deeply infected by overweening self-regard. How else explain passages as insulating and insulting as his description of war?
And as two football teams in scrimmage there
Men mix and wrestle, grunt, leap forward, fall,
The rush, the furor, pop! bang! whoa!
All shows in little to our frigid gaze.
The cry, the anger, the chaos, and the gong
Are far too distant to be serious.
Not all would agree with that last remark, given the demonstrations against the Vietnam War more than half a century ago.
Coriolanus and His Mother is a congealed casserole of Shakespearean imitation that makes you regret there ever was a Bard of Avon. The poem was a young man’s bit of show-offishness (Schwartz was barely twenty-five when the book was published), but perhaps critics do you a greater favor by damning your early work rather than mistaking it for genius. Recall Byron’s condescending lines about Keats in Don Juan: “John Keats, who was kill’d off by one critique,/ Just as he really promised something great,/ If not intelligible. . . ./ ’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,/ Should let itself be snuff’d out by an article.”
Keats’s first book,Poems, was slammed by some critics (“back to the shop, Mr. John, back to the ‘plasters, pills, and ointment boxes’”), but a young poet wrongly praised may eventually be murdered by the same critics who cruelly overestimated the fledgling’s power. Tuberculosis killed poor Keats, not a critic or two. His own death and the premature deaths of Shelley and Byron (boating accident, fever) occurred over barely three years in the early 1820s; but most major poets living into great age have found poetry hard going by their sixties. Eliot tapped out in his mid-fifties. After work like Otho the Great, however, Keats’s career might have ended much sooner.
Coriolanus and His Mother, as Bogan complained, is bloated with then trendy references to Freud, Engels, and Trotsky, every sign that being a poet of his times worked against the condition of Schwartz’s verse.
So she exults
That there is war and that her son makes war,
And with an urgent dogma she insists
That the meek girl, his wife, shall also feel
Her own sharp appetite,
while Sigmund Freud
Mutters beside me in the haunted night,
“This is the origin, this, this is the place,
Mother in love with son and son with her,
And his aloneness in the womb began,
Always unhappy apart from that tight cache:
O womb and egg, nervous environment,
How you have marred and marked this childhood’s man!
Unconscionable bag which none evade,
How your great warmth commits him to the shade.”
With lines like these, he was doomed from the start—as was Allen Ginsberg after Howl (1956). Little the Beat poet later wrote improved on that, and even Howl no longer lives up to its former reputation.
Schwartz’s tendency to lecture, even hector, his readers remains his least attractive trait. His dime-store version of Coriolanus is modern in the worst ways. The prose interludes between the acts sweat with cod philosophy and portentous rubbish from the lectern:
Surely the consequences will provide that fine thing, katharsis, concerning which one member of the audience has long been an expert; katharsis equal and even superior to that of the sexual act, which begins everything and ends nothing, and often, as everyone knows, produces as aftermath the most unutterable sadness, even in those so self-delighting that they are intoxicated by the comeliness of their own shadows.
Few of the poems of In Dreamshave held up well. Most show how empty Schwartz could be of nuance or suggestion (“Play billiards, poking a ball/ On the table, play baseball, batting a ball/ On the diamond, play football, kicking a ball/ On the gridiron,/ 70,000 applauding”). The titular short-story, excluded by genre from this long-awaited Collected Poems, edited by Ben Mazer, shares some of the defects of the poetry. Though once frequently anthologized, the story now feels workmanlike and crude compared to the shocking graces of those Southern Goths Flannery O’Connor and Katherine Anne Porter, writing at the same hour.
Schwartz’s next venture was a translation of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (1941), which provoked yelps of laughter when not snarls of rage. The scathing reviews focused on Schwartz’s liberties as well as his howlers. His somewhat free rendering does not seem quite so ruinous now, in the aftermath of Robert Lowell’s Imitations and Christopher Logue’s wrangle with the Iliad. Still, betrayed by his high-school French, Schwartz made unforgivable errors. In Délires II, he trips over des troupeaux (flocks, herds)—the line, translated by others as “Far from the birds, herds, and village girls” (Wyatt Mason) and “Far from birds and flocks and village girls” (Louise Varèse), unaccountably became, in Schwartz, “Far from birds, from trumpets, from village girls.”
He churned out, for a less conflicted Rimbaud passage,
I loved idiot paintings upon doors, decorations, backdrops of acrobats, signs, colored prints; old-fashioned literature, Church Latin, pornography without orthography, the novels of our ancestors, fairy tales, children’s books, old operas, silly refrains, naïve rhythms.
I favor Jeremy Harding’s more highly colored “idiotic paintings, motifs over doorways, stage sets, mummers’ backdrops, inn-signs, popular colour prints; unfashionable literature,” “erotic books with poor spelling, the novels our grandmothers read,” and “galumphing rhythms,” or Mason’s “I preferred bad paintings: hanging above doors, on sets of carnival backdrops,” “unfashionable literature,” “barely literate erotica, novels beloved by grannies.” There’s a slapdash quality to some of these phrases, freshening rather than dulling; Mason’s seem closest to what Rimbaud might have written, had he been English or American. The colon inserted instead of a comma gives the best sense of the French, uniting the list rather than leaving an assortment of junkyard spare-parts.
There’s a slapdash quality to some of these phrases, freshening rather than dulling.
Compare, too, the last sentence of the poem’s opening, “Je fixais des vertiges,” which Harding renders as “I took the measure of vertigo,” Varèse as the hard-to-grasp “I fixed frenzies in their flight,” and Mason as the expansive “I found the still point of the turning Earth” (deftly filched from Burnt Norton). Set these beside Schwartz’s somewhat ridiculous “I fixed vertigos,” which sounds like the boast of a Ferris-wheel operator caught sampling the motor oil. Perhaps “I was staring at dizziness” or “into vertigo” might have been closer to the French.
On occasion, however, Schwartz shows a fine ear for colloquial English. Where Harding turns “Je réservais la traduction” into “I would be the sole translator,” and Mason into “a poetic language . . . that I alone would translate,” Schwartz substitutes the superior “I reserved the rights of translation.” Varèse’s very similar “I reserved all rights of translation” came four years after Schwartz’s A Season in Hell. (Both were published by New Directions.) Better the richer but slightly angular alternative than cack-handed accuracy. Alas, Schwartz’s Rimbaud is often bungled when not bone-breakingly bad. Mary M. Colum had the sharpest knife, writing of the French poet,
It is difficult to imagine a prose of greater sensitivity: the sentences fall now like a sigh, now like a musical phrase, now like a lyric cry, now like an utterance out of a nightmare, now like a telling sentence out of popular speech. . . . [W]hat are we to say of a translator who, calling himself a poet, presents this subtle prose of a great poet in the English of a schoolboy tackling a “sight” translation and with an elementary knowledge of the French language?
The rest of Schwartz’s career was full of disappointments. A Season in Hell was followed by Genesis: Book One (1943), a semi-fictional version of his childhood, in preparation almost longer than the childhood itself. Autobiography has for millennia been the underlying engine of poetry, even epic poetry—some early scholars thought Homer must have fought in the Trojan War or at least been an eyewitness, so convincing were the scenes of slaughter. (Now, decades after the advent of the confessional poets, bland snippets of autobiography, in which there’s little to confess, have become the default mode.) Most poets hypnotized by The Prelude have had the good sense not to challenge its length or try to imitate its subtlety.
Schwartz follows his stand-in Hershey Green, the son of Jewish immigrants, from birth to age eight. The poet’s grandfathers had come through Ellis Island, living on the Lower East Side, while Schwartz’s father, a skirt-chaser who peddled insurance, became a land developer and later a somewhat slippery hawker of real estate. The boy grew up part of the time in a fancy apartment on Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway, though later, after the family fell apart, in Manhattan’s déclassé Washington Heights. His father, by then a Chicago millionaire, lost half his money in the Crash. The poet, like Keats, was later cheated of his inheritance.
The ambition of Genesis was not at fault for its failure, just Schwartz’s inability to temper and grind ambition into a scalpel. The poem remains over-egged and overcooked, switching between passages of iambic pentameter and others in Whitmanesque long lines. The glut of blowsy sequences shows how difficult it was for Schwartz to focus his muse—a poem half as long might have been twice as good, though I have my doubts. At times the poet sounds like a bargain-basement Walt who had read little but top-shelf Karl:
“America, the deity, America,
Let us now celebrate and criticize:
The growing deity, America,
Needs more men more and more to cut the trees
Of Nature, that most barbarous deity
—And cries to all who wince in Europe’s pain
Would you like to start from the womb again?”
The result, as so often in Schwartz, might be mistaken for the stump speech of a backwoods congressman. The poet’s friend Dwight Macdonald told him that Genesis was “unreadable, flaccid, monotonous, the whole effect pompous and verbose.”
If there’s a plan in this mishmash of overbaked verse and sub-Whitman prose, it’s not easy to follow—and, when you follow, it’s hard to understand why Schwartz felt obliged to tackle the same tale again and again, to pierce the psychology before and after, Freud’s collected works in hand. Longer with Schwartz was not deeper. He had many gifts, but concision was never among them—poetry is usually stronger when the poet lets the reader make the connections; but Schwartz, like some deranged electrician, left his poems full of backup generators and faulty wiring. He was victim of an inner fury, a tendency to destroy the very thing he was desperate to create. The good notices came from friends, but most reviews agreed that the poem was ridiculously overlong.
Schwartz could write perfectly acceptable pentameter when he wanted, but in Genesis it often sounds like prose padded into verse: “A fiancée; the quintessential flower:/ Who better shall draw from the little boy/ The first of all the many metaphors/ With which he will enact his hope and fear?” His narrative flits from prose to verse and verse to prose without making either seem necessary. Genesis reminds me of The Ring and the Book, which runs longer than either the Iliad or the Odyssey—but Browning, a far better technician than Schwartz, came much closer to writing a credible verse-novel.
Even Schwartz’s publisher, the genial James Laughlin, had little patience with the work. Though the poet again cajoled reviews from his literary buddies, receiving a warm but not overwhelmingly positive reaction, the bad reviews were disastrous. Paul Goodman’s piece in The New Leader is perhaps the best example of what even friendly critics might have wanted to say.
It is difficult to review this combination of ineptitude and earnestness. On the one hand, a calamitous lack of language, inaccurate learning, total want of plasticity, climax, or humor, and merely general or even second-hand observation of life and nature; nothing epigrammatic, nothing ironic, scarcely anything beautiful—and all this for 200 pages with the threat of two volumes more!
Genesis might have been much improved had Schwartz written directly about his childhood, even if, like Lowell in Life Studies (1959), facts had to be massaged into poetry. Schwartz had almost completed a sequel, Genesis: Book Two, taking Hershey Green to age sixteen. The poet was dissuaded—no doubt by the cacophony of criticism—from letting it reach print. Though never properly finished, this now follows Book One in Collected Poems, the pair amounting to some ten thousand lines of poetry. The poet was apparently also working on Book Three, but the reader has been spared whatever remains remain. It could have been worse. Genesis is a tedious, soul-killing family drama offered in lieu of autobiography. Schwartz never had any lightness of touch—he pounds in his lines like a navvy driving iron spikes. In his thorough biography of Schwartz, James Atlas remarks that Genesis “at times resembles a clinical case-study more than a poem.” At least it possessed no warring choruses of angels and demons to urge Hershey Green toward Good or Evil, no talking T. Rex to drag his soul down to Hell.
Schwartz published only two more books of poetry before he died in 1966, just fifty-two, from the accumulated poisons of barbiturates, amphetamine, and alcohol, capped by a heart attack. His body was discovered in a hallway of New York’s Chelsea Hotel. His final books, Vaudeville for a Princess (1950), another clunker of a title, and the posthumous Summer Knowledge: New and Selected Poems (1959), did nothing to revive the dead flowers of his reputation. The first included far too many parodies of and variations on the work of better poets, as well as titles so ungainly they might have been suggested by a cult of rhetoricians guzzling tea sweetened with belladonna: “True Recognition Often Is Refused,” “The Masters of the Heart Touched the Unknown,” “Starlight like Intuition Pierced the Twelve,” “The Silence Answered Him Accusingly,” and dozens more. Schwartz has now published more posthumous books than he did when pre-posthumous.
Collected Poems closes with the new poems included in Summer Knowledge, followed by a hundred pages of poems uncollected while Schwartz was alive, and others previously unpublished or published after the poet was in his grave. Many weak as wholes have beautiful lines I wish the poet could have made more of, such as “The mind is a city like London,/ Smoky and populous” or “The river’s freshness sailed from unknown sources,” as well as many that should never have made it to the page, like “The poet is the one who keeps the archives of the stones” or “O// Holy bird of words soaring ever whether to nothingness or/ to inconceivable fulfillment slowly.” There are passages so ludicrous that stuffed owls could nest there (one poem begins, “Faithful to your commands, O consciousness, O// Beating wings, I studied// The roses and the muses of reality”), as well as light verse that could make the Muses weep and Stephen Foster file suit (“O Nirvana/ Don’t you wait for me/ I’m going with mañana/ She’s the only girl for me”). Add to these the scads of singularly awful lines like “The heart, a black grape gushing hidden streams” or “What blooms after the lisping, lipping dimnesses . . . ?”
There’s little worse than Schwartz’s attempt to parody Robert Frost (“Whose booze this is, I ought to think I know/ I bought it several weeks ago”) or Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (“Come live with me and be my wife,/ We’ll seek the peaks and pits of life/ and run the gauntlet of the heart/ On mountains or the depths of art”) except a hapless rewriting of one of the tenderest passages in Leaves of Grass:
Whitman
Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men, and all so friendly,
Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome.
She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.
Schwartz
Twenty-eight naked young women bathed by the shore
Or near the bank of a woodland lake
Twenty-eight girls and all of them comely
Worthy of Mack Sennett’s camera and Florenz Ziegfeld’s Foolish Follies.
Almost inevitably, Schwartz falls short of Whitman’s subtlety, compassion, and tone. The Bard of Democracy gave his scene pathos with the wealthy woman watching shyly behind her window blinds. (Men swam nude at the time—see the great Thomas Eakins painting The Swimming Hole). Schwartz, reversing genders, made his own fantasy adolescent, lecherous.
Even when his poems start well, there’s too much salt or strychnine in the recipe. Often Schwartz sabotages his art by forcing the language as well as the point. A sonnet opens, “On the suburban street, guarded by patient trees/ Two family houses huddled. As I passed the lamplight’s teas . . . .” “Patient trees” is lovely, a reasonable violation of the pathetic fallacy; but the “lamplight’s teas” is impenetrable. (Could he have meant “tease”?) Then comes “hatred’s hot-bed,” which is bad enough, but a hotbed that “had sickened long ago.” Dr. Seuss might get away with that, but not Schwartz. Soon the poet is pawing away at tree bark, a “token/ Of reality’s texture.” By the time we get to the “heart’s diseased death-ridden toad,” the sonnet has collapsed into sheer silliness.
Schwartz had a maudlin streak half-a-mile wide. The sad, infuriating thing about him is that rarely, more rarely as his drinking got worse (he was house lush at the old White Horse Tavern, once the Hudson Street stomping ground of Hart Crane), a poem would show a glint of brilliance; but the glints reveal the triviality of what was left. In his last years, Schwartz could no longer access the talent he once had—when he died, it was the more devastating because he left so little of value. His papers almost ended up at the dump—they’re housed now in Yale’s Beinecke Library, due only to a chance phone-call received by Dwight Macdonald.
You have to be a rabid reader, or at least a deeply devoted one, to pore through the seven hundred pages of mouse print that compose Collected Poems, a blockbuster that’s also a backbreaker. Schwartz may not have deserved such a book—though, apart from the many typos, Ben Mazer should receive every compliment for keeping the memorial flame alive. (Is the line that places the Armistice in 1913 the editor’s typo or Schwartz’s?) Even so, the poet deserved better than this cramped and almost unreadable edition. Why shrink the font to save a few bucks? The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell (also published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was half again as long and twice as legible.
Unfortunately, Delmore now seems merely a Thirties second-rater, if far the most brilliant, one of those promising talents that turn to vinegar in the wine cellar. The few early poems that still straggle into anthologies (“In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave,” “The Beautiful American Word, Sure,” and “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me”) don’t make the same impression as the best youthful work of Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell. The most arresting of Schwartz’s poems are arch, unsettling, and heavy-handed; but they remain a few camels short of a caravan.
I doubt anyone could have rescued the poet from himself, especially after the raves he first received. He glided along on a reputation later books did nothing to gild, while the early poems looked less and less inviting. Often Schwartz’s best pieces riffed on a single symbol or metaphor—development was beyond or beneath him. His rather stuffy criticism, once highly praised, is now rarely read, if read at all. His poetic character was so complacent and self-absorbed that his company is hard to keep—some form of yearning or overconfidence was always in play. A little of the latter leaks into the grander projects of Lowell and Berryman—but perhaps Pound’s Cantos are to blame, though you might as well blame Milton, Pope, or Tennyson.
The trouble with Delmore is that he had, in poetry as in life, little self-control. Reviewing is rarely drudgery unless you’re faced with page after callow page of naked ambition that never matured, ambition befogged in musty rhetoric. You then understand how cruel the gods of poetry can be. Schwartz’s default style was like a terrifying coupling of Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, without the depth of either. It’s like being offered a magnum of stale champagne or a cake crawling with roaches. Viewed almost ninety years later, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities looks much less striking than critics felt. Schwartz was briefly the mop-haired darling and great coming-attraction of American verse; but like most coming attractions he was no longer attractive when he arrived. Bishop, Lowell, and Berryman are very much with us, Jarrell less so, apart from the best dozen poems; his devilish novel; and of course his criticism, sparkling with malice.
Schwartz, the former wunderkind, continues to be served by a dedicated cadre of littérateurs who have unsuccessfully tried to revive his reputation. In the past half-century, the books that have stirred up new interest in his work are limited to Saul Bellow’s roman à clef about his old friend, Humboldt’s Gift (1975), and James Atlas’s biography, Delmore Schwartz (1977). The tragic life had long since become more riveting than the tragic art. It’s nearly impossible to read Schwartz’s overstuffed and dispiriting collected poems without reflecting on the transient moods of contemporary taste, as well as the hubris that makes freshly gifted poets into humdrum also-rans. Schwartz was a poet who offered nothing beyond promise. Canaan, though signposted, was never reached.
William Logan’s latest collection of criticism, Broken Ground: Poetry and the Demon of History, was published in spring 2021 by Columbia University Press.