He Became a Fabulous Opera

As for the poète maudit, the French writer Barbey d’Aurevilly put it best: “There remains no choice for him but that between the muzzle of a pistol or the foot of the cross.” Redemption or extinction, Being or Nothingness: if the former is only afforded to a privileged elect, then one must recall that “the pistol” also offers itself in many guises. Silence is one path, even if it’s spent running guns in Ethiopia, as Rimbaud did. Baudelaire chose a less dignified option, his inspiration snuffed out under the cumulative weight of cynicism, rage, and syphilis. Or there is Hart Crane, who, along with Delmore Schwartz, was the great importer of Elizabethan prosody into the American modernist idiom, and who, with Yankee efficacy, found his “pistol” off the stern of an ocean liner one April noon. Finally, there is Schwartz himself, who flaunted dignity and succumbed, over two and a half decades, to the agony of the bottle:

[…] I drank the fire
Which gave coal-eyed Poe, in Baltimore
The rocking enraptured sea of his desire,
The death he sang, black handsome nevermore.

When Schwartz died of a heart attack at 52, excommunicated from the literary world that had once hailed his genius, his body laid for some hours in a hallway of the Columbia Hotel near Times Square before paramedics arrived, and then for two more days at the morgue until anyone claimed his body.

The great study triangulating New York, booze, and the artist has never been written. Schwartz’s poems are not it. Alcohol figures in his work much as opium does in Baudelaire or Coleridge: the scourge of the man, no doubt, but in verse something like a metaphor for the poetic attitude—a beatific aloofness from a fallen world to be garnered at the bottom of the glass, the saving and blear-eyed utopianism of the wastrel’s hope that tomorrow it could all change. Alcohol furnishes a reprieve from profane cares and a vantage of haughty indictment upon them, an attitude Schwartz most famously encapsulated in the phrase “summer knowledge”:

For, in a way, summer knowledge is not knowledge at all: it is
              second nature, first nature fulfilled, a new birth
              and a new death for rebirth

When Schwartz comes up in conversation today, two things are typically remarked of him. First, he is a man whose reputation has eclipsed his work, his stature as a poet having surrendered to the clamor for myth. Second, this myth is one of vertiginous and scandalous decline. Delmore Schwartz: an American tragedy. Both commonplaces have the unfortunate merit of being true.

His biography easily lends itself to historical synecdoche: his star rose amidst the New Deal optimism of the 1930s, his decline was contiguous with the conflagrations of the 1940s, and his irrelevance was assumed by the sanitized postwar culture of the 1950s. That a man’s work may become an appendix to the idea of him is exacerbated in Schwartz’s case by the fact that he was at the epicenter of a golden era of American intellectual life—as an editor of Partisan Review, as a prolific critic and teacher, as a prodigious wit, and as an unflagging hobnobber, gossip, politicker, and squabbler. Few among the literary cadres of the ’30s and ’40s did not know, let alone either extol or despise, such a divisive figure. Nearly sixty years after Schwartz’s death, the eulogies are more widely read than his own work. There is Humboldt’s Gift (1975), Saul Bellow’s portrait of the ailing, progressively lunatic writer Von Humboldt Fleisher. There is the astonishing sequence of John Berryman’s elegies, a renowned highlight of the Dream Songs: “He looked onto the world like the act of an aged whore. / Delmore, Delmore.” Robert Lowell recalled the spring of 1946, when he and his wife, Jean Stafford, visited Schwartz in Cambridge: “You said: / ‘We poets in our youth begin in sadness; thereof in the end come despondency and madness’.” That season predictably ended in a punch-up between the two poets.

Schwartz was his own greatest subject and saw poems as vehicles for self-mythologization. His artistic merits melded with his personal ones, and his poetic failures are but the shameful, dark mirror of his foibles. His wit became bile, his intelligence pedantry, his honesty a reflexive brutality: “Thus will he pay the dialectical price; / Each virtue when too swollen is a vice!” And so followed the entwined erosion of both his personal fortunes and the quality of his verse. In true tragic fashion, Schwartz’s decline was largely self-inflicted. The exuberant imagination that buoyed his early poems was no less vigorous but redirected toward the paranoiac fantasy and harebrained scheming that made him a pariah; keen observation curdled into gratuitous malice; unflinching self-analysis lapsed first into stultifying anxiety and then into a bog of cosmic self-pity. For all that Schwartz immersed himself in his major forebear, T.S. Eliot, he ultimately foreswore that poet’s gospel of impersonality and instead shipwrecked himself upon the shores of the ego: “Aut Caesar aut nullus! cries all egotism, / And cannot bear another’s criticism.” He fell prey to the cardinal sin for a poet: sentimentality.

To read Schwartz in the 21st century, and now upon the publication of his long-overdue Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), is to occasion the obvious question of revisionism: is the most famously underrated great American poet to be henceforth a great one tout court? Schwartz’s case is complicated insofar as he evades easy critical context—not only as a poet of temperament and of idealized idiosyncrasy, but also because he straddles literary periods, cultures, and traditions. He was born in 1913 to Romanian-Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn and so was a member of that liminal generation uniquely imbued with both a mythos of the shtetl and pogrom as well as of the Lower East Side and the American Dream. This generation shared an impassioned optimism in the US and an equal disappointment in the country’s failures to live up to its promise. Meanwhile, as an artist, Schwartz came of age in the 1930s, in the wake of American Modernism’s heroic phase, the period of Personae (1909), Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Harmonium (1923), and Spring and All (1923). Yet he came upon the scene prior to Modernism’s imperial era, when the divergent consolidations, canonizations, and devolutions of schools cemented legacies. The sacred idols of the Tradition—those pieties of meter, register, and form that ruled English poetry for centuries—were summarily deposed, and with no new temples yet erected, Schwartz entered an open field of trammeled detritus whose prospects for experiment and reconstruction were as wide as they were daunting for all but the most self-assured voices.

Schwartz was suspended between the Old World and the New. He mastered English prosody by his late teens, and read Milton, Blake, Shelley, and Donne, but he embraced the vernacular. He was committed to renovating a specifically American idiom—“the sing-song, slightly pompous intonations of Jewish immigrants educated in night-schools,” as Irving Howe put it. Likewise, he traversed high and low culture. He found his intellectual heroes in Marx and Freud, littered his verse with highfalutin allusions, but was impressed with a deeply demotic sensibility; besides poetry, his greatest passions were movies and the New York Giants. And perhaps most outwardly, he was at once heir to a gentile poetic tradition and yet vociferously, unapologetically Jewish. He saw in the Jewish character an otherness paradigmatic of the poet, “the alienation which only a Jew can suffer.” He needled Eliot for his antisemitism and violently broke with Pound over his (“A race cannot commit a moral act. Only an individual can be moral or immoral.... I want to resign as one of your most studious and faithful admirers.”) While his Jewish contemporaries coded their heritage otherwise—in Louis Zukofsky a quiet if unerring ground bass, in Charles Reznikoff mournful and prophetic airs—Schwartz, above all in his magnum opus Genesis: Book One (1943), loudly played the ployderzak, neuroticized and kvetched ad infinitum, a Vaudeville cousin to the Yiddish theater that enraptured his forebears.

And finally, we are apt to forget that he traversed genres. In addition to being a poet, his reputation as one of the greatest critics and short story writers of his day persevered long after his poetic star dimmed. Critics commonly acclaimed his fiction as the preeminent document of his milieu. He had, in prose at least, the rare gift, like Proust or the Goncourts, of elevating gossip to art. As testament to his precocity, we can see him, a virtual unknown at 23, publishing his first masterpiece in Partisan Review: the short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.”

***

“In Dreams…” became the first part of Schwartz’s eponymous debut, published in 1938. The dream in question is that of a young man, a thinly veiled Schwartz, who finds himself in a theater watching a film of his parents’ courtship: a single scene of afternoon idyll along the Coney Island boardwalk, the lapping waterfront and blithe charms of the fairground burnished in a haze of rose-tinted nostalgia and the guilelessness of juvenile romance. And yet the narrator is party to some unspecified dramatic irony. Upon seeing his father propose marriage, he exclaims to the screen, “Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.” (Indeed, we might attribute these words to Schwartz himself, whose childhood, along with his brother’s, was defined by his parents’ disastrous marriage–his father a philanderer, his mother driven half-mad by abandonment and indigence.) The narrator devolves into hysterics and is dragged from the theater. He wakes into “the bleak winter morning of my 21st birthday, the windowsill shining with its lip of snow”—snow being a canonical Schwartzian symbol of visionary purity, as indicated by this passage from Genesis:

O, when the snow falls, he forgives all shame,
Forgets the turning world and every hope,
And every memory of guilt and pain,
He seeks no future and regrets no past,
Satisfied by the fat white pieces’ fall—

Schwartz has only one theme proper: that of man defined as both the material product of his environs and his spiritual vocation to exceed those environs. The essential Schwartzian conflict is between the individual and Providence, imagined not so much as divinity as its modern avatars: history, biology, and psychology. That man is drawn on a rack of necessity and freedom is a theme as old as Western civilization. Typically, it is what we call tragedy.

If “In Dreams…” confronts tragedy through the lens of biography, then Schwartz’s poems embellish the scope of vision. Reading them almost a century after their publication, the near-unanimous contemporary assessment still holds: these are some of the greatest lyric poems ever written by an American. It is a truism that poetry, lyric poetry above all, aspires to the status of music, and so it’s perhaps hollow to note that what is most striking upon reading a Schwartz poem—steeped as its author was in the French Symbolists—is its musicality. He is, above all, virtuoso: Schwartz’s poems evince a thriving density of rhythmic correspondence—of counterpoint and refrain, of motifs that referee the colloquy of lines from without, of inversions and catalexes that phrase them from within. He is a neoclassicist, hewing to regular meters and at his strongest in blank verse, guided by the Elizabethan intuition that in strict form is freedom, not constraint. The pentameter is no prison in Schwartz but a dancing partner against which he pushes with tensive energy.

Similarly, his diction carries shades of Milton in the punctual cadences of its Latinate syntax, albeit mellifluent with driving assonances or the occasional drawling American idiom. Indeed, here is another boundary that Schwartz straddled as a unique amalgam of two American Modernisms: that between the canonical experimentalisms of Brahmin Northerners and the high formalism of the Fugitives. This is the music of lightness and order, of fine-grained structure all the more compelling encountered acrobatic and fleet. The analogy of young genius notwithstanding, Schwartz’s is the music of Mozart, as seen in these lines from “Prothalamion”:

                                 and Mozart shows
The irreducible incorruptible good
Risen past birth and death, though he is dead.

Little wonder then that Schwartz explicitly claims the poem sequence “The Repetitive Heart” to be “in imitation of the fugue form.” Schwartz is a master of first lines, and these are no exception: “Dogs are Shakespearean, children are strangers”; “I am to my own heart merely a serf”; “The heavy bear who goes with me”; “A dog named Ego, the snowflakes as kisses / Fluttered.” These are beguiling formulations that are at once obscure yet pregnant; they recall Stevens’s opening gambits in Harmonium. The lines introduce a devolving economy of image, rhythm, and theme that realizes itself step-wise before returning to its origin point, a well-wrought object, self-enclosed. This is the basic logic of the villanelle or sestina—a restrained lexicon set to rondo, generating a combinatoric drama—albeit promoted to an expanded field appropriate to modernist experiment. A serf to his own heart, “sick of its cruel rule, as sick / As one is sick of chewing gum all day,” he will find respite in sleep “Knowing its vanity the vanity of waves” and yet ...

Merely wake up once more,
                               once more to resume,
The unfed hope, the unfed animal,
Being the servant of incredible assumption,
Being to my own heart merely a serf.

The metaphor of emotional self-alienation meets its physical counterpart in the aforementioned “heavy bear” of Schwartz’s body. He was tall and broad, high-browed and sharply featured, and cut an imposing figure that later succumbed to bloat and jaundice. His was “A caricature, a swollen shadow, / A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive.” Here is self-deprecation that prefigures the Confessionals (who took much from Schwartz), and yet evades conceitedness by the brilliance of its imagery, evoking a vulgarity “In love with candy, anger, and sleep, / Crazy factotum,” and a pathetic perversity “bulging his pants, / Trembles to think that his quivering meat / Must finally wince to nothing at all.” The bear is a lascivious stain upon idealized love, as it “Stretches to embrace the very dear / With whom I would walk without him near, / Touches her grossly ... Dragging me with him in his mouthing care.” There is palpable confidence in these poems that wear their conceptuality on their sleeve. If they might initially appear abstruse, this is more a matter of the (beautiful) convolutions of their diction than any philosophical argument.

The third part of In Dreams is the slyly-titled “Poems of Experiment and Imitation.” These poems’ exacting construction belies any slapdash sense of experiment, and besides the clear influence of Eliot and Yeats, there’s nothing derivative about them. They overlay the confessional mode with a more didactic one, invariably focused upon that great Schwartzian theme: man as a prisoner of accident beyond his reach. Only “Prothalamion” frames this with regards to the sordid family drama of his youth,

For thus it is that I betray myself,
Passing the terror of childhood at second hand
Though nervous, learnéd fingertips.

Schwartz abets his portrait of this antagonism beyond the realms of biography, adding shades of history and metaphysics. Often, he bears this out with blunt resignation. In what is perhaps his most anthologized poem, “In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave,” the speaker, lying awake at night (Schwartz was a lifelong insomniac), sees a simulation of the famous Platonic allegory, in the shifting shadows projected by car headlights upon his ceiling. Mimicking the philosopher’s path, he moves to the window to regard “The winter sky’s pure capital” before returning to bed, obscurely enlightened, to proclaim abruptly and bathetically:

O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail
Of early morning, the mystery of beginning
Again and again,
                     while History is unforgiven.

While Schwartz always sought to overlay biography and myth, ennobling the profane former and inspiriting the dead letter of the latter, here we see their exemplary synthesis. “The Ballad of the Children of the Czar” performs a similar fusion, evoking a scene of the late Czar Nicholas II’s children playing with a bouncing ball, its caprice a metaphor for a fate beyond their control. “Spinning in its spotlight darkness, / It is too big for their hands. // O pitiless, purposeless Thing, / Arbitrary and unspent,” before Schwartz acknowledges the dramatic irony of their eventual murder: “Sister is screaming, brother is howling, / The ball has evaded their will.” Invoking himself under the yoke of the same history (“O Nicholas! Alas! Alas! / My grandfather coughed in your army”) he also indemnifies a parallel tyranny: “I am my father’s father, / You are your children’s guilt. // In history’s pity and terror / The child is Aeneas again ... The past is inevitable.”

Elsewhere, he deploys one of his most consistent devices, donning the guise of personae to induce a certain irony through the mediation of dramatic form. The dour cynicism of an elderly Faust is lightened when framed as senile blather: “Spontaneous, I have too much to say, / And what I say will no one not old see.” Henry James, strolling along the beach at Far Rockaway, is a mandarin consumed by anxiety, obtuse to simple pleasures of “Fun, foam, and freedom” and “That nervous conscience amid the concession / Is a haunting, haunted moon.” Indeed, where there are intimations of an escape from the prison house of circumstance, it resorts to a strange simplicity. When Socrates rears his head on several occasions, he may lament that “The mechanical whims of appetite / Are all that I have of conscious choice,” but he still lauds “the sky’s inexorable blue / —Old Noumenon, come true, come true!” He proclaims solace in “The infinite task of the human heart.” The aforementioned “Prothalamion,” on the other hand, turns from Schwartz’s parents’ botched marriage to an idealized love buttressed by poetry: “My mother’s rhetoric / Has charmed my various tongue, but now I know / Love’s metric seeks a rhyme more pure and sure.” In the mere fact of desire, he locates an inexhaustible resource whereby he may become an “octopus in love with God, / For thus is my desire inconclusible ... Seeing me in my wish, free from self-wrongs.”

These are all platitudes. But that is no essential fault: what’s at stake is not a philosophical tract but a collection of poetry—a first one no less, whose prime mandate is to lay out the quandaries that define a career rather than “solve” them. In this regard, Schwartz sets himself an ambitious ambit. Already we see a tension that progressively suffused his work. A dictum of Hölderlin’s is apt: “You’ve a head and a heart? Reveal only one of them, I say; if you reveal both at once, they’ll doubly damn you for both.” If Schwartz’s tragic view of man produced a dilemma of the head, it is in the heart that he sought his grace, a latent ambivalence that dictated the wavering stakes, the manifest surge and ebb of the self-dialogue that defined all his verse to come.

Nowhere is this more finely distilled within In Dreams than in the narrative poem “Coriolanus and his Mother.” Broadly hewing to the plot of Shakespeare’s original, Schwartz sees in his protagonist a paradigm of individual self-determination: “His freedom creates the future.... With his freedom he does it, his unknown creative act.” And yet as the masque reaches its climax, Coriolanus poised to sack his native Rome at the head of a foreign army and thereby ratify his symbolic overcoming of his provenance, he yields to his mother’s pleas and spares the city. A fine ambiguity proceeds. On one hand, Coriolanus elects the path of the Heart (“His knees slip under him, his weakness shows. / He cries out loudly, ‘Mother, Mother, Mother! / You win!’”) Yet he cannot return to Rome: to do so would be to capitulate his individuality and incur a spiritual death. For Schwartz, to freely choose one’s own bondage, that typically German solution, is a cop-out. The sole alternative is death itself: in choosing exile, Coriolanus is swiftly murdered by the foreign army with which he conspired. He maintains his claim to a radical freedom, but this may only be consummated in an act of suicide. The speaker is hardly comforted by the terrible exigency of what he supposed to be the individual’s salvation: “Man’s will is free, / This man became the man he chose to be!’ // My face is covered by my hands to hide / Intolerable emotion, distorted look.” This is the unresolved quandary that became the terrain of Genesis.

***

It’s difficult to overstate the acclaim that met In Dreams. Schwartz was branded the preeminent literary genius of his generation and was immediately paralyzed by the prospect of producing a worthy follow-up. He was never a poet of negative capability: his dancing vigor and bright sincerity rely on a tonal assurance and thematic bravado, to which hesitancy and self-doubt are fatal—if they are not to become mere prettiness and melodrama respectively. This is when he began to drink in earnest. His 1939 translation of A Season in Hell augured the first missteps. Indeed, to call it a translation is generous: Schwartz’s French was, by his own admission, of high school level, and there are some howlers here (troupeaux [herds] for “trumpets” or je rêvais [I dreamt] for “I reviewed”!). Critics lambasted the book (the first pile-on of the many that henceforth punctuated his life), though Stevens and Eliot were complimentary.

Indeed, it seems Schwartz had less intention of creating a faithful rendering than a Schwartzian one. After all, he admired Rimbaud’s principled exit from a culture of dilettantes and sought to reenact the will to radical individualism characteristic of Rimbaud’s poems. A line such as “I became a fabulous opera: I saw that all beings have a fatality for happiness: action is not life, but a way of softening some power, an enervation” has certainly lost something of its Rimbaudian character but at the expense of a tone that is unmistakably Schwartz's. The fact that one could speak of a Schwartzian idiom by the poet’s twenty-sixth birthday is testament to his force. Heterodox translation was familiar to modernism, yet while there is nothing here of Pound’s program to mine the latent energies of the Chinese character or Provençal assonance and analogize these into an alien, astonishing English, there is something like what Lowell called “Imitations,” a fertile sparring between kindred voices.

Schwartz’s mind, however, was already elsewhere. The acclaim that met In Dreams heralded some of the most productive years of his life. He began teaching at Harvard, and his criticism and fiction were buoyed by a steady stream of accolades. In verse, he turned his prime creative energies to that great mitzvah of all major modernist poets: the epic. Never one to shy from pomp, he called this masterpiece-to-be Genesis. It was the product of a long gestation; Schwartz conceived it years before and completed at least two major autobiographical works in preparation (needless to say, Genesis was only ever going to be a work of autobiography). Schwartz began working on it in earnest in 1940, partly spurred by a reading of Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts (1904—08), which paradigmatically foregrounds personal experience against a landscape of fatalist, historical allegory. Two years later, Schwartz sent the work to his publisher James Laughlin at New Directions, who was on vacation and promptly lost the manuscript. (He found it under the floor of his station wagon a few months later.) “Genesis — all eggs/one basket,” Schwartz nervously scribbled in his journals just before publication. Indeed, had he made good on his original plan to complete three volumes of Genesis, it would have been one of the longest poems in the English language (Book One, the only volume completed, ends shortly after the protagonist’s seventh birthday.) Schwartz characteristically flaunted his ambition:

this poetic style will be seen as the beginning of Post-Symbolism, as Cézanne was the beginning of Post-Impressionism.... I with like usages of style give to the Symbolism that has reigned from Baudelaire to Eliot the solidity and the lucidity of the classics and the narrative ground of the epic.

He boasted to the long-suffering Laughlin that “now [I] fear that it is so good that no one will believe that I, mere I, am author, but rather a team of inspired poets.” Elsewhere, this arrogance was shown up for the gnawing vacillation it concealed: “Sometimes it just looks peculiar and full of private obsessions,” he admitted to the critic Arthur Mizener. Simply put, Schwartz staked his posterity upon Genesis and any reinvigoration of this legacy a century later must reckon with it.

The Modernist impetus toward the epic is reparative. In an era unsettled by the fragmentation of time, the epic provides a zone of exemption from history’s discombobulation in a stable habitus of myth. If the Schwartz of In Dreams counseled flight before the prison of circumstance, in Genesis he hazards transformation over escape: a poetry enacting not an abstention from the accidents of provenance but an alchemy of these into consummate myth—contingency transubstantiated into necessity, biography into Destiny, character into Fate. We meet Schwartz’s surrogate, Hershey Green, at a familiar confluence of Schwartzian tropes, “sleepless and seeking sleep,” poised before his window overlooking a snow-covered New York City. Drowsing, he encounters a chorus of voices:

“A number of the dead have come to you,
O Hershey Green!”
[…]
“Many a night you told yourself your life,
Tell it to us, we have no more to do”
[…]
“Come with your endless story, Hershey Green”
[...]
“This is the way to knowledge and to freedom,
Logos, man’s inner being going out,
Up!”

For 300 pages Hershey obliges, or, more precisely, draws out Genesis as a rally between him and his spectral audience. Declaiming his yarn in self-styled “Biblical prose” while the ghosts form a tragic chorus, he punctuates his diegesis with blank verse commentary demonstrating insight, wit, and divagation. This is a dramaturgical design marked by a pointed irony in appropriating the canonical exemplars of the gentile epic—the King James Bible and Milton—to what would be the most outwardly Jewish work of a stridently Jewish poet.

Genesis begins in the Old World, tracing the two lineages that converge in Hershey: his father Jack, the discontented son of a deserter from the Tsar’s army, and his maternal grandfather Noah, a second-rate merchant. Both men steal away westward. A classic tale of coming to America ensues as they make ocean crossings, arrive in penury, and with time make good on the pledges of the American dream. Jack, a drifter at his core, eventually makes the fateful acquaintance of Noah’s daughter, Eva. Their courtship is tumultuous from the outset. Jack is a serial womanizer who seesaws between cold absence and peevish remorse, fueling Eva’s frenzy and egotism. The marital rally of ceasefire and retribution continues until Eva, in an attempt to staunch the cycle, decides that a child is the only thing that will make Jack into the stable husband she craves. Some 55 pages in, Hershey Green is born. From here Genesis shifts its lens, from the arc of history to that of the infant’s family romance. Caught in the crossfire of a marriage gone scorched earth, the young Hershey relays both the travails of childhood—night terrors, daydreams, playground fights, the first stirrings of libido, the first brushes with antisemitism, the novelties of Christmas and school—as well as his formative traumas, culminating in the most scarring event of his (and Schwartz’s) childhood—his mother, dragging him into a roadhouse, confronts his father, ensconced with one of his many mistresses:

Poor Hershey Green, for whom this scene becomes
Arch-typical of every living room
Until he shouts himself, denouncing all,
Himself, his parents, and America!

Throughout this saga, the ghosts return to the refrain “Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas” (“He is happy who knows the causes of things”). Its source is Virgil: to know the unbroken chain of cause-and-effect is to transcend it and our encounter of the first cause—He who created it. Analogously, to submit a life entirely to the principle of sufficient reason is to belie contingency by an essential agency, to recuperate the debris of lived life in the unity of a final cause: the self-made myth of a poet thus redeemed in his poetry. This is a method of saturation in which every detail must be made meaningful. And this is why Genesis must sprawl, not merely out of Schwartz’s native garrulity, but out of the work’s inner logic. And “sprawl” here cannot be used in an entirely nonpejorative sense.

It must be said: Genesis remains a failure. Its faults are glaring even on a first pass. Most noticeable is its length. While the first third engages by virtue of being a good yarn, the momentum wanes with Hershey’s birth, whereupon, already almost two thousand lines in, Schwartz demands our interest and sympathies over the most minor peccadillos of childhood. If Modernism taught us anything, it’s that the epic inheres in the banal. Schwartz is cognizant of this shift in frame; he tinges these sections with characteristic irony. Indeed, irony is what elevates parts of Genesis to undeniable local brilliance. And yet irony is not a saving grace. As the ghosts sing:

Let us have irony for some relief,
– Irony is release, caricature
Yields momently a freedom from strict pain,
As in the August heat, lightning and rain!

And irony becomes precisely this: momentary comic relief from Genesis’s slew, when it is in fact antithetical to the poem’s central thrust. The basic narcissism of Schwartz’s project prohibits him from turning Genesis into mock-epic; a narcissism of spirit is not by itself a poetic sin, but it becomes one when we’re made to read nearly 300 pages of a self-effacing joke. Where Schwartz does indulge ironic self-deprecation, it feels glib, a disingenuous apologia for what is nevertheless a conscious artistic decision.

Genesis’s themes aren’t developed so much as iteratively illustrated, the chorus often taking on the role of a ham-fisted manicule, gesturing to truths of which Hershey is the exemplar, in a fashion that seems forced rather than organic. Making a telos of the teller might have primed Genesis to be a Künstlergedicht, but Schwartz hardly raises the themes of art and vocation which are presumably what is most special about Hershey. He could also have girded the poem with cohering dramatic irony and a motive. Instead, Genesis marks time through burgeoning event and detail. It opts for quantitative accumulation over qualitative, thematic development. At base, it’s an empirical exercise. This is the method not of the poem but of the picaresque novel; Genesis would have fared far better as a stirring work of prose than the faltering poem it became.

Nor is the poetry itself immune from lapses. It’s no surprise Schwartz’s intricate style is overbearing at this scale, and too often he lapses into an easy singsong that is always latent in his verse. This touches upon what was perhaps Schwartz’s greatest deficiency as a poet: for all his critical ability, he was unable to assess and play to his own fortes. Indeed, reading Genesis, one has the impression that Schwartz wrote it not from any artistic compulsion, but from an outward-facing anxiety over his forebears—a sense that a great poet of the age must desecrate all false idols of poetic convention in his early lyrics, before prophesying a new world in his own image in the form of a Waste Land, a Cantos, or a Paterson. While Schwartz had the technical chops to make good on the former part of that program, he lacked the amplitude and originality of vision that is the premise of the latter.

Nowhere is this more evident than in his philosophical musings. Schwartz was formally trained in philosophy, and his poetry is littered with references that skirt pretension only by virtue of their canny reformulation, yet Schwartz himself was never a philosophical thinker. For all of his incredible book learning, his verse never creatively synthesizes this voluminous knowledge in the same way a poem by Eliot or Stevens is a subtle rereading of F.H. Bradley or George Santayana. Schwartz’s is the logic of the example, of concept and narrative held at a remove, rather than their amalgam in dialectic. This wouldn’t be an issue were it not such a consistent habit in Genesis, above all with Freud. Perhaps no other figure had as great an influence on Schwartz, and yet, as the poet’s friend William Barrett put it, “Freud was a disaster for Delmore.” At every opportunity, Hershey is made out as an exemplary victim of the family romance so that even the most minor scenarios—a bedwetting, a Christmastime trip to Macy’s, his exclusion from a game of baseball—are supposedly elevated once cloaked in the analyst’s jargon:

O penetrate this surface deeper now:
See how the Super-Ego grows in him
And how the adult’s point of view is learned
Against the grain, against the animal

The fundamental problem with Genesis is a fundamentally American one. The extremist romantic individualism of the American experiment is at once the great dynamo and albatross of American art and politics. And yet to sing a song of oneself is to necessarily transform that self. Thus, the paradoxical power of Whitman, in whose work the self’s expansion is also its temperance: a capaciousness wherein the poet may envision the residence of a new polity, one based in the erotic conjugation of bodies and the commune of souls. At the very least, the poet aspiring to universality must make himself an emblem and gesture at some significance beyond autobiography, if an art is to be made of the self. Puzzlingly, and maddeningly, Schwartz never so much as grasps at this gesture. Hershey is not paradigmatized over Genesis’s course, but sequestered in a redoubt of his own idiosyncrasy that is valued only for its own sake. For all its scale, range, and polyphony, Genesis does not contain a multitude but buttresses solipsism. A fine approach for the analyst’s couch, but not for an epic poem.

The confusion hanging over Genesis stems from the fact that it is not, finally, an epic. The epic pretends to the eternal. It inhabits a static order immune to history (and is largely unconcerned with matters of genesis, beginning instead in medias res). Genesis, however, unfolds in time, history being nothing less than Schwartz’s opponent to be subsumed in a self-made myth. The convocation of necessity from contingency, the articulation of the infinite from the finite—this is not the theme of the epic. Rather, it is that of tragedy. Genesis fails insofar as Schwartz fatally misjudged his theme. The American Tradition might seem primed for tragedy—what else is the hubristic individual to do but dash himself upon the inertia of his circumstance?—but tragedy is only downfall in the most superficial sense. Tragedy is an apparatus for the cognition of human finitude: by inducing fear of the gods and pity for mortals, it negotiates the prerogatives of Man’s Estate between the infinite and finite. Catharsis is the onset of this knowledge, a pleasure taken in a newfound groundedness that knows the scope and limits of our autonomy. The burgeoning case file of Hershey Green is never afforded this anagnorisis, so Genesis never performs the tragic function whereby man is reconciled with his ken. Instead, it interminably flounders. The American psyche is suicidal but not tragic; it will sooner annihilate itself in perverse vindication of its freedom than make a gentleman’s agreement with higher powers. And Genesis deigns to furnish either option of possible closure. Schwartz was an American poet who set himself a fundamentally un-American problem. And yet if he ultimately failed to consummate the tragedy that was his artistic mandate, he would at least suffer a precipitous downfall. For this, we must look beyond Genesis.

***

Hence, the long, agonized denouement. Volumes Two and Three of Genesis were abandoned, a vast flotsam of impressionist disjecta, curio scenes in blank verse that tantalize insofar as they periodically sidestep the congenital defects of Volume One. Once Hershey is of age, this becomes especially apparent, his self-interrogation leaving the mire of psychoanalytic dogma to address more capacious themes of his nascent artistic, erotic, and religious sensibility:

Please speak of something else awhile, let go
My horrid childishness and Caesar ego
A little while. Let me look at some joys
In your rich minds, rich with all the views of life

There are slogs: Schwartz’s baffling obsession with Charles Lindbergh, for instance, or else reams of the same Polonian philosophical disquisition. (And it’s not even necessary to broach the squirming secondhand embarrassment felt upon reading Schwartz trying to poeticize his puberty.) At least, these are now tempered by moments of genuine verve returning to the verse:

Recites the young Republic’s easy trope
And falls by accident into a part,
 
Comedian,
 
             center of laughing attention,
Glad to be foolish, if the cause of mirth

Yet, by this point it was too late. The critical furor over Schwartz’s great work, in addition to the poet’s own conviction that he was spent by age 30, meant that these fragments were to remain but alluring insinuations of the total work that could have been his salvation. An irrevocable testament to squandered talent. When asked at a soirée a few years later about when the sequel volumes of Genesis might appear, Schwartz could only muster a curt “posthumously.” The years after were not kind on the man himself either. His progressive alienation from both literary circles and professional prospects was compounded by a disastrous divorce and an eventual breakdown that culminated in a brief institutionalization. Invariably bouncing between any given downtown flophouse and the White Horse Tavern, he settled into his newfound role as a has-been, an untimely relic of a bygone scene.

His collection Vaudeville for a Princess (1950) proved that even his prodigious lyric gift was not exempt from this decline. The rhythms in it have utterly lost the tautness of his earlier work. They plod. They are content to lean back and be carried by the pentameter rather than tarry with it. Collapsing into tawdriness, the density of the music is a patness of rhyme and alliteration that bears on the obnoxious—a pseudo-Hopkins, as in these lines from “Once in the Fire’s Blaze I Touched the Seen”:

To fall and dream and fall to seem because I hope
As when a fire’s clear furs or fat tongues leap,
A flowing flawless flowering tulip scene

Now unshielded by melodic niceties, the didacticism and bromides that always lurked in Schwartz’s work grate more forcefully. Accompanying this is a flirtation with more civic themes. And yet in this mode Schwartz is typically content to wear an unflattering patrician disdain, or else exhibit a blockheaded remove from events that comes off as stupendous ignorance, as in “Some Present Things Are Causes of True Fear”:

And if some students of the age declare:
“As for this age, it’s hardly worth a jeer,
Hitler and Stalin rule our ruthless time,
This is the age of matchless worldwide crime!”
 
Let these romantic critics go elsewhere

Perhaps worst is the fact that this is still recognizably Schwartz’s work, not a deviation from it so much as a consummation of the hammy tendencies that lingered in the wings of his early brilliance.

Still, brilliance had not left him entirely. A new theme emerged in Summer Knowledge (1959), the final poetry collection he published in his lifetime—a theme that, like those of In Dreams or Genesis, has its power in its simplicity. If Hershey Green dramatized the travails of the will in combat with its condition, Summer Knowledge takes that escape as its assumed premise. It is the ecstasy of being always already removed from the original sin of history. And “For summer knowledge is the knowledge of death as birth, / Of death as the soil of an all abounding flowering flaring rebirth,” it is a mythic temporality of cycles of georgic temperance. Schwartz’s career is structured by a chiasmus, of worldly decline in counterpoint with spiritual elevation. Indeed, his earlier poems had spiritual evocations of Poetry, Love, Pleasure, and the like that were saved from platitude, by both the ingenuity of their expression and the allowances we make for a juvenile idealism evincing more vitality than ignorance. Of course, the same alibi is not available to the elderly song of experience, and it is a relief to see Schwartz slip into this mode with purpose and design demanded of the tack. His vision gains definition, at last. Where his tendency to abstraction previously fell flat, he now sets the native sensuousness of his language to evocations of concrete experience with rousing effect. The magnificent, extended, and ekphrastic “Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon Along the Seine” is an icon of eternal sabbath:

Each micro pattern is the dreamed of or imagined macrocosmos
In which all things, big and small, in willingness and love surrender
To the peace and elation of Sunday light and sunlight’s pleasure, to the
           profound measure and order of proportion and relation.

Detached from platitude, these gleanings of paradise are no longer a forced solution to a problem but a habitat in themselves. To return to Hölderlin’s adage, Schwartz has left off the head for the unbroached supremacy of the heart. The latent spirituality of his temperament was often occluded beneath its myriad other contradictions. Here, given free rein, we discover his unexpected capacity as a visionary poet.

This capacity was embodied for Schwartz in the theme of music. So begins a major poem of this period, “At a Solemn Musick”:

Let the musicians begin,
Let every instrument awaken and instruct us
In love’s willing river and love’s dear discipline

Music, of course, is the testament to a language ulterior to our broken, human one, to the inherence of Beauty and Intelligence in the mundane, the intimation of natural law for those otherwise immune to faith. For Schwartz it is a means of recapturing poetry’s primal function of praise:

Before the morning was, you were:
Before the snow shone,
And the light sang, and the stone,
Abiding, rode the fullness or endured the emptiness,
You were: you were alone.

This music is governed by a rallentando. Where the brisk agility of Schwartz’s earlier lyrics enables the rhythmic work of correspondence to compass the whole poem, here the line forms the basic unit of the meter. Lines largely eschew the pentameter for greater length, each unfolding according to its own internal logic of cadence rather than any predetermined form. Notably, anaphora—which often courted garishness in Schwartz—becomes a structuring, pulsive engine of measured progress. This is stateliness as late style, mature assurance exhibited in a poised, firm clarity to the diction paralleled in the Eliot of the Four Quartets (1943) or the Stevens of “The Rock.”

And yet there is nothing here precisely that is a solution to the dilemmas that ravaged the younger poet. The basically tragic quandary that Schwartz set himself remains unresolved. The succor of summer knowledge does not offer him anything of a tragic reconciliation with providence. It is a salvation, yes, but one annunciated, not negotiated, that holds a special prospect for the American torn between an inadmissible subjugation and a terrifying, self-annihilating freedom. “The True-Blue American” approaches this in the sometime mock-epic mode of Genesis, portraying Jeremiah Dickson, a young child who must “choose between a chocolate sundae and a banana split”:

Being a true-blue American, determined to continue as he began:
 
Rejecting the either-or of Kierkegaard, and many another European
Refusing to accept alternatives, refusing to believe the choice between;
Rejecting selection; denying dilemma; electing absolute affirmation:
              knowing
                        in his breast
                                    The infinite and the gold
                                    Of the endless frontier, the deathless West.
 
“Both: I will have them both!” [...]

This is a total repudiation, in fact, a profounder, consummate yes—underwritten by the knowledge that the clarion profanities of the poète maudit against his world, are only ever the outward guise of his abiding faith in the grace of another. For an American poet—from a nation of free men that must live forever or die by suicide—this is the redemption offered not in the self-absorbed retrospect of a Genesis but the forged amplitude of an Exodus.