Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz

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Though Delmore Schwartz’s reputation is sadly diminished from what it was at his beginnings in the late 1930s, it has been kept alive thanks to James Atlas’s excellent if depressing biography, which appeared in 1977, eleven years after the poet’s early death. Alas, the biography was a success not so much because people were at the time interested in Schwartz’s poetry, but because of the cautionary nature of his life story. Readers indifferent to modern poetry could still take grim relish in the classic saga of a brilliant poet, first heralded as a genius, the greatest young poet of his day, who quickly burnt himself out due to mental illness and addictions to alcohol and narcotics, and died almost forgotten at the age of fifty-two in a seedy hotel room in New York’s Times Square district. In a way, Atlas’s biography is the contemporary counterpart of Samuel Johnson’s great essay on the little-known eighteenth-century poet Richard Savage, which has become a classic study of the self-destructive, paranoid artist. Unfortunately, the story of Delmore Schwartz’s life hasn’t really sparked an ensuing revival of interest in his poetry. It has, however, kept his Selected Poems and several other collections of his writings in print at New Directions, which first published him in the thirties, and also resulted in the publication of a volume of his letters and a copious selection from his unpublished notebooks. The patient, that is to say his reputation, is still alive, if not exactly well. But the extent of Schwartz’s fall from grace can be measured by the fact that, although his early work was admired by Eliot, Auden, and Wallace Stevens, and such influential critics as R. P. Blackmur and F. W.

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