James Atlas, _Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet_

NOT SURE WHAT to make of my loving to read about Delmore Schwartz but never much liking to read Schwartz's poetry. His critical essays have some snap to them ("The Duchess' Red Shoes" takes a healthy bite out of Lionel Trilling) and I think the story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" is an American classic. He thought of himself as a poet, though, and I can't think of a single poem of his I wholly admire. He had a rare talent for titles: "In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave," "The Heavy Bear that Goes with Me," "Starlight Like Intuition Pierced  the Twelve." Poems that lived up to those titles I would cherish, but the poems Schwartz actually wrote for those titles never get out of second gear.

When people are writing about him, though, he lights up the page.  William Barrett's The Truants, for example--I have kept that tiresome book on my shelves for decades just because of its passages on Schwartz. Or Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth, a brilliant book, especially for its portrait of Schwartz. Or Humboldt's Gift, the only Bellow novel I would ever be tempted to re-read.

Atlas's biography appeared in 1977. I was a bit reluctant to pick it up, not sure I was up for a book-length treatment not by Bellow, but it's very good. Focused more on the astonishing liftoff of Schwartz's career with In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938) than on the sputtering descent of the 1950s and 1960s, Atlas's biography conveys the wit, energy, and chutzpah that made Schwartz such an unforgettable figure. Its prose is graceful, its pace swift, its judgments sound. Good book.

T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Wallace Stevens all thought Schwartz was the real deal. He was the next generation of Modernism, but then it all came apart. The dissolution of his career probably had a lot to do with his own precarious mental health. These days, he would have drawerfuls of prescription meds. In the 1940s and 1950s, though, he had to manage as best he could with sleeping pills, dexedrine, and alcohol, which went very badly. 

Somehow, though, I think the real problem was not him, not Schwartz's particular history and demons, as much as it was that there couldn't be a second generation of High Modernism. Its classics were not imitable; they did not serve well as models. Lowell and Berryman did their best work once they gave up trying to be High Modernists. Frank O'Hara and Jack Spicer decided they weren't going to try. Schwartz tied himself to the mast...and went down with the ship.