When Delmore Schwartz published his selected poems, Summer Knowledge, 50 years ago, in 1959, he was among the most critically acclaimed and recognized names in American poetry. And for many years after his death in 1966 at the age of 53, he remained a prominent figure.
The musician Lou Reed, a former student of Schwartz’s, spoke of him as a muse-like figure. Saul Bellow, a former friend, based the character Humboldt Fleisher on Schwartz in his 1973 novel Humboldts’s Gift. And in 1977, James Atlas published a celebrated biography of Schwartz, detailing his literary precociousness, his passionate, obsessive ambition, his meteoric rise to fame, and his tragic last years in a debilitating, manic-depressive haze.
Where Has Delmore Schwartz Gone?
But it’s all changed now. Unlike his contemporaries Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman and others, Schwartz is not an important figure in the poetry world today. It could be argued that Berryman, with his postmodern, playful sense of poetry’s potentiality and scope, is the most influential of the group. Lowell, though often criticized, still commands respect, sometimes for his early flights of intense lyricism, and sometimes for his pioneering work with autobiographical poetry. Bishop and Jarrell are widely revered.
But rarely is Schwartz spoken of as an influence, and the term “Schwartzian” never emerges from the mouths or pens of poets or literary critics. It’s almost as if his meteoric rise went into a total tailspin.
The Power of Being Consistently Different
So is Schwartz worth another look? Revisiting Summer Knowledge reveals some fascinating things about Schwartz’s unique talent, and the ways in which poets remain or drop out of a culture’s consciousness.
The first five poems of the book are almost completely different. “The Ballad of the Children of the Czar,” a devastating adult satire in the guise of a perfectly controlled children’s poem,” is followed by the wonderfully erudite yet sensual “In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave,” and then “At This Moment of Time,” The Beautiful American Word, Sure,” and “O Love, Sweet Animal” seem like equal parts Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Theodore Roethke, all brewed with distinct Schwartzian elements and details that as if turn those other names inside out, from mere influences to intricate partners.
Just as today a poet’s career is often built upon writing the same kind of poem over and over, we can comfortably speak of a Jarrell poem as a Jarrell poem, or a Bishop poem as a Bishop poem, even though both of them admirably and intelligently administered to evolving their talents and interests. Schwartz, on the other hand, was more of a brilliant chameleon, and therefore not as easy to compartmentalize and discuss, and therefore, unfortunately, prone to disappearing.
True Music and Romance
There’s something else unique about Summer Knowledge, most apparent in later poems in the book. There’s an almost sentimental exuberance to Schwartz’s voice that clearly reveals his love for the music and romance of poetry. That sort of approach toys with failure by threatening to come apart at the seams, but it’s certainly refreshing in light of today’s more professionally minded poetry establishment, where even comic flights of fancy can seem engineered or studied based on the latest trends.
All in all, maybe it’s time to send that meteor back up into the sky.
Douglas Nordfors - Douglas Nordfors grew up in Seattle and graduated from Columbia University (BA) and The University of Virginia (MFA). Before going on to ...
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