Of all the great American poets of the so-called Middle Generation, Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966) is perhaps the most enigmatic. As a poet, Schwartz is the least read of a group that includes Lowell, Berryman, Jarrell, and Bishop; his reputation has suffered a bit since his death in 1966, and I am not quite sure I know why. I can only confirm, at least for myself, that I have never been a great fan of Schwartz’s work and find his poetry to be as philosophical as Eliot’s, but not as poetic; full of big ideas, but deaf to the music of the language. None the less, his influence on his literary peers was great, thanks in part to his editorship of the Partisan Review from 1943 to 1955, which was the premier journal of the day.
Robert Lowell (1917-1977), along with Elizabeth Bishop, is probably the most accomplished American poet of his generation. Both he and Schwartz suffered from bouts of mental illness, something Lowell gently alludes to in a poem dedicated to Schwartz, quoted below:
To Delmore Schwartz
(Cambridge 1946)
We couldn’t even keep the furnace lit!
Even when we had disconnected it,
the antiquated
refrigerator gurgled mustard gas
through your mustard-yellow house,
and spoiled our long maneuvered visit
from T. S. Eliot’s brother, Henry Ware….
Your stuffed duck craned toward Harvard from my trunk:
its bill was a black whistle, and its brow
was high and thinner than a baby’s thumb;
its webs were tough as toenails on its bough.
It was your first kill; you had rushed it home,
pickled in a tin wastebasket of rum—
it looked through us, as if it’d died dead drunk.
You must have propped its eyelids with a nail,
and yet it lived with us and met our stare,
Rabelaisian, lubricious, drugged. And there,
perched on my trunk and typing table,
it cooled our universal
Angst a moment, Delmore. We drank and eyed
The chicken-hearted shadows of the world.
Underseas fellows, nobly mad,
we talked away our friends. “Let Joyce and Freud,
the Masters of Joy,
be our guests here,” you said. The room was filled
with cigarette smoke circling the paranoid,
inert gaze of Coleridge, back
from Malta—his eyes lost in flesh, lips baked and black.
Your tiger kitten, Oranges,
cartwheeled for joy in a ball of snarls.
You said:
“We poets in our youth begin in sadness;
thereof in the end come despondency and madness;
Stalin has had two cerebral hemorrhages!”
The Charles
River was turning silver. In the ebb-
light of morning, we stuck
the duck
-’s web-
foot, like a candle, in a quart of gin we’d killed.
The correspondence below is taken from 1959, the year Schwartz won the Bollingen Prize for Summer Knowledge. That year was also a big one for Lowell. He published Life Studies to great acclaim (by most), a volume which included the poem quoted above. Life Studies marked a break in Lowell’s poetic career; the volume eschewed the traditional meters and late-Modernist sensibility of his earlier work. It was largely prose-poetry and confessional and exerted great influence on many late 20th century American poets. At any rate, here’s the letter from Schwartz to Lowell…enjoy.
New York City 14
April 12, 1959
Dear Cal,
Many thanks indeed for the money and for the very nice things you say about my new work. Under ordinary circumstances, as you know, I prefer to put off publication as long as possible, but I have been publishing so much and writing so much ( I can hardly believe the amount myself) for the same reason that I called and asked for help. Since the situation looks as if it might continue for some time, I suppose that production will have to continue at the same rate until I seem to become not a writer but an industry.
It was very pleasant to speak to Liz—I think the last time I saw you two was in the pages of Life—and I hope you will let me know when you’re in New York again, so that we can spend an evening together. I liked all of your poems [Life Studies] very much and was quite touched and flattered by the to me, and meant again and again to write and tell you so. The stuffed duck belonged to Bill Van Keuren and he shot it—I’ve never shot anything but pool—and although it was not his first kill, his last occurred a few months ago: he shot himself, something I was afraid would occur for some time, for he was one of the most unfortunate and unhappy beings I have ever known.
Your poems in the winter P.R. are as good as anything you’ve written and they have that peculiar honesty which Eliot speaks of in Blake and which he says other human beings often find unpleasant. In your poems the courage to be so open and subjective, in the best sense of the latter word, makes your writing have a new quality of intensity, an intensity so moving that it is heartbreaking.
Please do try to see when you’re in New York again: it’s been too long, and I thought of you very often, and there’s so much to talk about. Love to Liz,
Delmore
P.S. I must add one other note of detail about Cambridge in 1946. What I said then, as I know from the anthology I read and wrote in, was: “We poets in our youth begin in sadness
But thereof come, for some, exaltation,
ascendancy and gladness.”
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