Once and for All: the Best of Delmore Schwartz (New Directions)Delmore Schwartz was best known to me for being referenced by Lou Reed on the Velvet Underground andd Nico album. He taught at Syracuse University in the early 60's when Lou was a student there.
He reminds me a little bit of Rosemary Tonks, not only in the way his early promise wasn't to realize its potential, but for the way his poems are at odds with the world.
In I Am to My Own Heart Merely a Serf,
I have been sick of its cruel rule, as sick
As one is sick of chewing gum all day;
are lines that might have been attributed to Rosemary if we didn't know better, echoing Baudelaire, disdaining or despairing of the expectations of the ordinary.
The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me might be himself, the part of himself he doesn't like that thwarts him,
distorting my gesture,
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit's motive.
but True Recognition Often Is Refused finds some solace in the difficult circumstances of the poet in,
The early morning light we have deserved.
The poems haven't perhaps aged particularly well but are of great interest. It is the critical writing in which he excels, particularly in The Isolation of Modern Poetry which hasn't become any less relevant in the last fifty years. He traces the ways in which poetry separated itself from the rest of the world, spoke only to itself and,
for the poet,
this private life of his sensibility is the chief subject available to him.
The modern poet has nothing to do beyond the cultivation of his own sensibility. Oh, Delmore, thou shouldst be living at this hour!
He is also impressive in his letters, firstly writing to Ezra Pound in admiration and later resigning 'as one of your most studious and faithful admirers' on account of the irrational argumernts for anti-semitism in Pound's book, Culture.
I was surprised to find The World Is a Wedding described as short stories in the introduction because I thought it was a very short novel when reading it. It is like a precursor of Donna Tartt's The Secret History with its elite characters struggling to come to terms with themselves.
Dr. Bergen's Belief similarly has breakdown, in the form of the doctor jumping from a fifteenth storey window,
The stench of this life offends me too much at last.
and the reader can't help but reflect upon John Ashbery's commentary in the introduction on Schwartz's self-mythologizing and wonder if there's any piece in which he doesn't.
Nonetheless, for all its glorious, patchy dissatisfactions, there is much to admire in Delmore Schwartz and this is an excellent place to check it out, in which one might have been grateful of a few more poems to see what else there is.
