Great Symbols Enacted the Age!

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.

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.

“No poet is free of particularity, nor would any poet wish to be,” Schwartz wrote in a 1941 essay about Yeats titled “An Unwritten Book.” What follows Schwartz, from his first lyrics through the decades-long writing of Genesis, was his middle-class Jewish upbringing in Brooklyn, where he was born in 1913 to immigrant parents from what is now northeastern Romania. This was not only a personal subject but also a springboard for thinking about world events and the American place in them. In “The Ballad of the Children of the Czar,” from his first book, Schwartz compared his own comfortable childhood to the unlucky Romanov offspring, who met their fate

While I ate a baked potato
Six thousand miles apart,

In Brooklyn, in 1916,
Aged two, irrational.

His was not the Brooklyn of crowded tenements, but of stately homes on Eastern Parkway and Ocean Parkway; his New York education was not at City College, with its famous alcoves of student activism, but at NYU and Columbia, where Schwartz found his way to a quiet radicalism. Schwartz’s father was a real estate investor who, after divorcing Schwartz’s mother, moved to Chicago, where the young Delmore spent summers being chauffeured to Wrigley Field to take in baseball games from a private box.

His parents’ separation, the Depression, and then his father’s death in 1930 had a profound impact on Schwartz. So did his move to Washington Heights, where he lived from age seven and embarked on a self-education in local libraries. The earliest works in The Collected Poems, which appeared in a publication of the George Washington High School Poetry Club, are boyish but confident odes to the saxophone, whose “sobbing fits the city,” and the automobile, which carries “a tiger, coiled inside a gear.” Schwartz studied philosophy at NYU under the leading Trotskyist intellectual Sidney Hook and would remain under his sway for decades. After graduating in 1935, he pursued a PhD in philosophy at Harvard, only to drop out after a few semesters. Leaving behind “sick and used Cambridge,” as he would later call it in “The Morning Light for One with Too Much Luck,” from Vaudeville for a Princess, Schwartz returned to New York “to live between terms, to live where death / Has his loud picture in the subway ride.”

Schwartz’s timing was impeccable, in line and in life. In his early twenties, he appeared in the first issues of Kenyon Review and Partisan Review—the latter in its revamped anti-Stalinist iteration—as well as Poetry magazine’s May 1936 special issue on “Social Poets.” Most propitiously, Schwartz cold-called James Laughlin just months after he founded New Directions. Soon Schwartz appeared in the press’s refined annual, his name engraved on a stone obelisk in the cover illustration alongside e. e. cummings, Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams. This was the beginning of a lifelong association with Laughlin, who was at once friend, patron, employer and, per Schwartz’s Second World War draft card, the “person who will always know your address.” (Schwartz spent the war teaching at Harvard through a Navy program.)

When New Directions published In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, the week of Schwartz’s twenty-fifth birthday, it was a sensation. It would be difficult to overstate the immense promise and pressure projected onto Schwartz, who was introduced to the public as “the new Hart Crane,” “the American Auden,” and “the first real innovation that we’ve had since Eliot and Pound.” Schwartz idolized Crane and T.S. Eliot, and closely followed and corresponded with Auden and Ezra Pound. But unlike these four poets, he would not enter self-imposed exile. He sought inspiration instead in his own country and personal history. In the eleven-part poem “The Repetitive Heart,” Schwartz called down his twin muses:

Abraham and Orpheus, be with me now:
No longer the grandstand, nor the balcony,
Nor the formal window gives me cool perspective:
Love sucked me to the moving street below

The poems in In Dreams are obscure and romantic, repetitious and extravagant, and presented with learned epigraphs from the likes of Aristotle, Alfred North Whitehead, and Marx (“To be radical is to get to the root of things. The root of the individual, however, is the individual himself”). They display a youthful obsession with time and death, a dandyish taste for archaisms, and a genius for titles that Schwartz maintained throughout his career (“Tired and Unhappy, You Think of Houses,” “Saint, Revolutionist,” “Parlez-Vous Francais?”). In one of the finest poems, “In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave,” Schwartz is lulled into a philosophical meditation by a passing car or truck:

In the naked bed, in Plato’s cave,
Reflected headlights slowly slid the wall,
Carpenters hammered under the shaded window,
Wind troubled the window curtains all night long,
A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding,
Their freights covered, as usual.

But one of Schwartz’s quirks is that most of the poetry he wrote was not in this shorter lyric style, but in epic form. Genesis: Book One, published in 1943, is a book-length narrative of the first few years of Hershey Green, an “Atlantic boy” growing up on the same Brooklyn street as Schwartz. Told through several voices, and tracing Schwartz’s own family history starting from a grandfather’s desertion from the Russian army in the Balkans, the poem is a fascinating look into Schwartz’s psyche. The first section, in which angels call on a young Hershey in a mock-epic tone to “begin your endless story,” should be humorous, but it is spoiled by Schwartz’s self-serious introduction, in which he situates his project among Dante, Eliot, the authors of the Gospels and, of course, through its title, the Almighty himself. And while Schwartz’s unorthodox gestures in his first book gave his poems their modernist, form-undermining edge, here his choices seem haphazard. Much of the language is epic but somehow not elevated, as in a long section attempting to dramatize the 1878 Congress of Berlin and resulting treaties.

Still, there are passages of lyrical brilliance, such as this tribute to his beloved New York Giants:

Not roulette, not the cards
with medieval faces
Taught him the drunkenness of chance and liberty. But major league baseball, going on like a life,
Victory and defeat, a daily progress and drama, a sacred egotism, a gaming patriotism in which
The heart fell in love with an entity too big to know, a moving entity
made by many powers, made by
The teams of capitalism. For there in the light of the stadium,
Great symbols enacted the age!

Here we have pure Schwartz: the particularity of his upper Manhattan youth, his emotional invocation of the zeitgeist in the everyday, and a hint of political economy.

On account of the book’s style, or perhaps the awkward timing of publishing an exploration of the self as the Second World War raged, critics were cold to Genesis. “In 1943, the taste and critical vocabulary for poetry like Genesis had not yet been created,” critic Adam Kirsch has argued. Undeterred, Schwartz labored for years over future volumes of his epic, but almost none of it was published. Genesis: Book Two shows that Schwartz did not heed the reviewers, instead continuing to tell mundane childhood memories with incongruous intensity. The philosophical flights of fancy from a chorus of uncredited voices are occasionally pierced by his earthy New York wit (“Justice / In classic linen, bare foot and blindfolded / Like a Barnard girl playing Antigone / In Central Park”).

What Schwartz did have to show for his efforts over the rest of the 1940s was Vaudeville for a Princess, published in 1950, a collection of mostly topical poems, such as “On a Sentence by Pascal” and “Chaplin upon the Cliff, Dining Alone.” The light tone that permeates these works belies Schwartz’s serious political evolution. It was during these Cold War years that his former mentor, Sidney Hook, became a leading anticommunist voice, organizing Schwartz and other New York intellectuals against a 1949 pro-Soviet conference at the Waldorf Astoria in New York and founding the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, with which Schwartz became associated. Schwartz also sat on the advisory board of Perspectives U.S.A., Laughlin’s new magazine that peddled American soft power, and received a stipend from Intercultural Publications, the Ford Foundation–backed nonprofit that published it. A few months after the Waldorf Astoria conference, Schwartz published his first poem in Commentary. “Today Is Armistice, a Holiday,” later reprinted in Vaudeville, signaled a new detachment, with a touch of cynicism, that departed from Schwartz’s norm: “Today is a holiday in the Western heart, / –Three cheers, my dears, we celebrate the peace! / If not a true peace, since we now take part / In a new death.”

Summer Knowledge, which collected recent and previously published poems, appeared in 1959 to acclaim, winning the Bollingen Prize, an unusual honor for a Selected Poems. Although later editions featured a now-iconic photomontage of a dashing young Schwartz, in the original author photo Schwartz looks anguished, with dark circles under his glassy eyes and a deeply furrowed brow. The book brought Schwartz new attention but not the help he needed. Schwartz suffered from insomnia—“sleepless and seeking sleep / As one who wades in water to the thighs,” as he introduces his narrator in Genesis: Book One—and an addiction to what would prove to be a fatal combination of sleeping pills, Dexedrine, and wine. “By 1961 he was a ruined man,” Atlas, his biographer, judged ruefully. The New York Giants had moved to California, and Schwartz maintained a lonely existence in a New Jersey farmhouse, on the fringes of academic and literary life, after years of bouncing between Cambridge and New York.

A cycle of breakdowns, fallings-out, evictions, lawsuits, divorces, and other romantic separations was finally broken by an invitation to teach at Syracuse, where Schwartz had his fateful encounter with that twenty-year-old kid from Long Island named Lou Reed. (“Sleepless Atlantic boy! born in Brooklyn, / that is, Long Island, / Which seems to head for North America / Just like an ocean liner coming from Europe,” Schwartz intones in Genesis: Book Two.) A few years later he was back in New York City, prone to confabulations and glued to stools in Village dives while writing, rewriting, and never finishing his great work, like the notorious Joe Gould who haunted the same neighborhood around that time. In 1966, Schwartz collapsed in the hallway of a Times Square hotel, dying of a heart attack on the way to the hospital. His body lay unclaimed for days, a detail often repeated to drive home the depth of the bottom he had hit.

The Collected Poems is an undeniable and overdue accomplishment. Mazer, a Massachusetts-based poet who has edited, among other books, The Collected Poems of John Crowe Ransom, has done an enormous service by gathering Schwartz’s works and providing notes on their provenance. A standout among the previously uncollected poems is the terza rima “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,” which appeared in the 1937 New Directions anthology. It reads, in its entirety:

I looked toward the movie, the common dream,
The he and she in close-ups, nearer than life,
And I accepted such things as they seem,

The easy poise, the absence of the knife,
The near summer happily ever after,
The understood question, the immediate strife,

Not dangerous, nor mortal, but the fadeout
Enormously kissing amid warm laughter,
As if such things were not always played out

By an ignorant arm, which crosses the dark
And lights up a thin sheet with a shadow’s mark.

Its pacing is perfect, and it shows Schwartz’s facility with shifting perspective, through the arm’s shadow on the screen, like the headlights on the wall in his imagined Plato’s cave.

In the bucolic “This Is a Poem I Wrote at Night, Before the Dawn,” from 1961, Schwartz sounds every bit like Whitman (who, incidentally, also spent his last years in New Jersey). It begins:

This is a poem I wrote before I died and was reborn:
—After the years of the apples ripening and the eagles soaring,
After the festival here the small flowers gleamed like the first stars,
And the horses cantered and romped away like the experience of skill;
mastered and serene
Power, grasped and governed by reins, lightly held, by knowing hands.

But we must also contend with poems from a series called “Kilroy’s Carnival,” which even the ever-supportive Atlas called “simply awful.”

The Collected Poems includes seventeen poems from Schwartz’s papers, held at Yale’s Beinecke Library, described as “previously unpublished”— although one, “Dr. Levy,” appeared in The Uncollected Delmore Schwartz, edited by Mazer and published by the small Arrowsmith Press in 2019. These mostly undated poems, several of which are titled “Exercise,” were written in two spurts, toward the beginning and end of his career, and show Schwartz moving in his usual wide range, from existential meditation to comedy. But knowledge of Schwartz’s sad state undercuts the humor of his unsteady send-up of Robert Frost, “Stopping Dead from the Neck Up,” which opens, “Whose booze this is, I ought to think I know. / I bought it several weeks ago.”

Despite its title and size, this volume has not collected all of Schwartz’s poetry. Missing here are many fine poems that Schwartz composed in letters and journals, some of which are quoted at length in Atlas’s biography. Errors that crop up, while small—such as added words, altered section breaks, and misattributed publishers—also detract from the collection’s authority. For example, a line from “The Ballad of the Children of the Czar” that should read, “Well! The heart of man is known: / It is a cactus bloom” is rendered as “the heart of a man is known,” changing the meaning and interrupting the “heart of man” leitmotif that runs through In Dreams.

A larger problem of inclusion arises regarding Schwartz’s prose and plays, which he often published alongside and within his poetry. Mazer keeps the prose sections of Genesis: Book One but not Book Two, and omits the prose “bagatelles” that intersperse the poems in Vaudeville. He also excludes Schwartz’s verse plays, such as Shenandoah (1941), despite calling it “Delmore’s third book of poetry,” while keeping Schwartz’s verse drama from In Dreams, “Coriolanus and His Mother: The Dream of One Performance.” There is no perfect solution short of a comprehensive Collected Works, but something is lost by inconsistently separating out the genres Schwartz worked in, since Schwartz, in his own introduction to Genesis, reproduced here, was adamant that “the use of prose and verse in the same work is nothing new or strange.”

At the same time, Mazer includes Schwartz’s 1939 translation of Rimbaud’s prose poem A Season in Hell. “In this edition, it is categorized as original poetry,” Mazer explains, “for it is for original poetry that we sometimes read translations, and it is as original poetry that this stimulating translation has its greatest value.” But Schwartz intended his translation to be read as such, and considered his innovations to be, as Atlas wrote, the result of “ignorance rather than imagination.” And if Rimbaud counts, why not Schwartz’s translations of Heine?

More than anything else, reading all of Schwartz’s poetry together forces us to see past the legends that center on his failures, and appreciate what he did produce. We encounter a new trajectory: the mysterious, modernist “self” that Schwartz sketched in the 1930s morphed into a more literal portrait of his own story. His early cosmopolitanism also took a sharp domestic turn. Schwartz, and his work especially after In Dreams, was deeply American. He declined an offer to teach at Salzburg and was awarded a Fulbright to the Free University of Berlin but never went. His engagement with European culture was profound but literary, through reading, quotation, translation, and imitation. He reached Russia through his politics, Romania through his family, France through Rimbaud, England through Auden, and Ireland through Yeats. Yet Schwartz maintained that he had, fundamentally, “a Washington Heights view of our time.”

Schwartz’s engagement with Americanness—and what he called “the most lucid product of American life,” baseball—was, unlike Pound’s, earnest and unironic. His autobiographical mode prefigured the confessional poetry that would later predominate in America, and his mix of erudition and bohemianism anticipated the Beats (although he was critical of Ginsberg’s ilk). Schwartz comes across as a poet cursed with the task of writing the Great American Novel, the linear narrative structure he employs in Genesis at odds with his poetic cosmology of time’s revolutions. His teenage haiku “Darkness,” from 1932, already concisely exhibited what would be his lifelong preoccupation with this theme:

What words should be said
When this eternal curtain
Slowly falls again?

In one of life’s great cycles, the following year, the New York Giants won the World Series.

Michael Casper is the coauthor, with Nathaniel Deutsch, of A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg.