Great Symbols Enacted the Age!

A new collected volume tries to finally make Delmore Schwartz’s oeuvre whole. To read it is to enter his world of symbols and subways, grand ideas and sacred genealogies.

Delmore Schwartz (courtesy of New Directions)

The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz
edited by Ben Mazer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024, 720 pp.

More than perhaps any other poet in New York in the 1930s and ’40s, Delmore Schwartz defined the direction of American letters. “Cosmopolitan, radical, at home with Rilke, Trotsky, Pound, he was the very embodiment of the New York intelligentsia,” James Atlas wrote in his classic 1977 biography of Schwartz. A provocative, Byronic figure who edited Partisan Review in its prime, Schwartz was at all the parties: the one where Norman Mailer stabbed his wife; another where Schwartz himself accosted Hannah Arendt; gin-soaked parties with W.H. Auden, Djuna Barnes, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and Dylan Thomas. Schwartz is crouching, with a cigarette and a mischievous smirk, in the foreground of a famous 1948 photo in which Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, and other members of the American literary pantheon blend into the crowd. Irving Howe, the cofounder of Dissent, remembered that on the eve of the Second World War, Schwartz was “the poet of the historical moment.”

After his tragic death in 1966 at age fifty-two, Schwartz’s standing only grew, but now as a martyr of American modernism and its postwar fracturing. Saul Bellow summoned Schwartz as the titular character in his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Humboldt’s Gift and John Berryman dedicated The Dream Songs to his “sacred memory.” Thanks to Robert Lowell’s loving portrait, Schwartz is forever wearing “one gabardine suit the color of sulphur / scanning wide-eyed the windowless room of wisdom.” Lou Reed, his student at Syracuse, said he was “the greatest man I ever met.”

Despite Schwartz’s legend, much of his work has been conspicuously unavailable for the better part of a century, including many poems from his reputation-making 1938 debut collection, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. His output, which also included stories and plays, has been overshadowed by his turbulent life, prompting the publication of his selected journals and letters, as well as essays, plays, and stories. Now The Collected Poems, edited by Ben Mazer, tries to finally make Schwartz’s oeuvre whole, bringing together more familiar works such as Summer Knowledge: New and Selected Poems (1959), with two long out-of-print titles, Genesis: Book One (1943), the only published installment of a planned epic, and the forgotten Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems (1950). Combined with part of Genesis: Book Two, Schwartz’s translations of Rimbaud, and dozens of posthumously published, uncollected, or previously unpublished poems, the result is about seven hundred pages of Schwartz’s singular voice. To read them together is to enter Schwartz’s world of symbols and subways, grand ideas and sacred genealogies...