![]() Schwartz left his unpublished papers, which could have provided the perennially impecunious poet with some savings, behind him when he abandoned Manhattan for a teaching post at Syracuse University in 1962. Schwartz was a victim of drink like Dylan Thomas, his contemporary and fellow habitué of The White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, but the life of the latter ended on a victory lap of the United States, while Schwartz’s body lay unidentified for two days in a morgue after he died. The publication in the 1970’s of Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow’s roman a clef starring Schwartz, and a biography by James Atlas produced a temporary uptick in Schwartz’s reputation, but that brief burst, like the last fireworks of the summer, seemed to confirm the end of the bright display of his powers once the publicity and sales fizzled out. ![]() The response I got at each successive literary doorstep on which I stopped was umbrage along the lines of “Well of course we’re going to do a retrospective on Schwartz, we have someone working on it already!” The offended dignity was voiced in each case by someone whom you suspected, from their excessive protest, wouldn’t know Delmore Schwartz from Franklin Delano Roosevelt.Īrt is long, life is short, goes the aphorism, but in Schwartz’s case the life was short (he died at 52, in 1966), and the art-for reasons hard to fathom-didn’t outlive him by much. Eliot and Ezra Pound-when Schwartz was just 24. In the summer of 2013 I began to make the rounds, in an electronic fashion, of literary magazines to remind them of the upcoming centenary of the birth of Delmore Schwartz, the man who was hailed in the 1930s as the “American Auden.” Schwartz was responsible, in the words of Allen Tate, the second poet laureate of the United States, for “the first real innovation” that we’ve had since Eliot and Pound”-surely the anniversary merited recognition.Īs an admirer of Schwartz since my undergraduate days four decades before, I would suggest to print and net publications that I was the ideal candidate to write an appreciation of the man whose first book of poems and short stories, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, had been praised by the likes of T.S.
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