Delmore Schwartz

The first complete collection of the poetry of Delmore Schwartz, "the most underrated poet of the twentieth century" (John Berryman). When Delmore Schwartz published his first short story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," in Partisan Review in 1937, he became an instant literary celebrity. After the appearance of his first book (by the same name), he was inundated with praise. The famed poet Allen Tate wrote to him, "Your poetic style is beyond any doubt the first real innovation that we've had since Eliot and Pound," and T. S. Eliot himself wrote Schwartz a letter asking him to compose more poetry. The brilliant start of his career is matched perhaps only by its tragic end, a lonely death after an extended period of alcoholism, depression, and derangement. Today, more than fifty years after his death in 1966, Schwartz is often remembered for the tragedy of his life rather than for the innovation and sad brilliance of his greatest work. This book brings together all of Schwartz's poetry for the first time, from his groundbreaking debut collection to his unpublished late work, which he kept writing until his death. Accompanied by Ben Mazer's illustrative notes and introduction, The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz offers readers the long-awaited opportunity to rediscover one of the most influential and original poets of the twentieth century. As Mazer writes in his introduction, "It is the poems that count now. And it is the glory of the poems that survives here, awaiting new life."

The first complete collection of the poetry of Delmore Schwartz, "the most underrated poet of the twentieth century" (John Berryman). When Delmore Schwartz published his first short story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," in Partisan Review in 1937, he became an instant literary celebrity. After the appearance of his first book (by the same name), he was inundated with praise. The famed poet Allen Tate wrote to him, "Your poetic style is beyond any doubt the first real innovation that we've had since Eliot and Pound," and T. S. Eliot himself wrote Schwartz a letter asking him to compose more poetry. The brilliant start of his career is matched perhaps only by its tragic end, a lonely death after an extended period of alcoholism, depression, and derangement. Today, more than fifty years after his death in 1966, Schwartz is often remembered for the tragedy of his life rather than for the innovation and sad brilliance of his greatest work. This book brings together all of Schwartz's poetry for the very first time, from his groundbreaking debut collection to his unpublished late work, which he kept writing until his death. Accompanied by Ben Mazer's illustrative notes and introduction, The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz offers readers the long-awaited opportunity to rediscover one of the most influential and original poets of the twentieth century. As Mazer writes in his introduction, "It is the poems that count now. And it is the glory of the poems that survives here, awaiting new life."

With his New Directions debut in 1938, the twenty-five-year-old Delmore Schwartz was hailed as a genius and among the most promising writers of his generation. Yet he died in relative obscurity in 1966, wracked by mental illness and substance abuse. Sadly, his literary legacy has been overshadowed by the story of his tragic life. Among poets, Schwartz was a prototype for the confessional movement made famous by his slightly younger friends Robert Lowell and John Berryman. While his stories and novellas about Jewish American experience laid the groundwork for novels by Saul Bellow (whose Humboldt's Gift is based on Schwartz's life) and Philip Roth. Much of Schwartz's writing has been out of print for decades. This volume aims to restore Schwartz to his proper place in the canon of American literature and give new readers access to the breadth of his achievement. Included are selections from the in-print stories and poems, as well as excerpts from his long unavailable epic poem Genesis, a never-completed book-length work on T. S. Eliot, and unpublished poems from his archives.

Now with an exciting new preface by rock musician Lou Reed (Delmore Schwartz s student at Syracuse), In Dreams Begin Responsibilities collects eight of Schwartz s finest delineations of New York s intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s. As no other writer can, Schwartz captures the speech, the generational conflicts, the mocking self-analysis of educated, ambitious, Depression-stymied young people at odds with their immigrant parents. This is the unique American dilemma Irving Howe described as that interesting point where intellectual children of immigrant Jews are finding their way into the larger world while casting uneasy, rueful glances over their backs. Afterwords by James Atlas and Irving Howe place the stories in their historical and cultural setting.

Delmore Schwartz became the voice of a new generation, when In Dreams Begin Responsibilities was published in the debut issue of 'Partisan Review' in 1937. The title story tells of an unnamed young man who has a dream that he is in an old-fashioned movie theatre in 1909. As he sits down to watch the film, he starts to realize that it is a motion picture documenting his parents' courtship. At turns he becomes engrossed, upset and outraged, in a story that set the stage for the arrival of an acclaimed literary voice.

Five verse plays, at once fiercely original and in the tradition of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, by a major American poet of the twentieth century.

Delmore Schwartz was the golden boy of the American literary scene until his untimeley death in 1966, alone and destitute. James Laughlin was the founder of New Directions, publisher and editor of the Modernists. This collection chronicles a correspondence that began with Schwartz's first unsolicited submission to Laughlin in 1937 and continued throughout the friendship that lasted until the poet's death. The relationship that developed between them was both literary, steeped in their own work and the work of their contemporaries, and personal: gifted storytellers, they delighted each other with factual and fictional observations. The two remained friends and colleagues until the mental illness that eventually claimed him, began to destroy Schwartz's ability to trust even those closest to him.

When this book was first published (as Summer Knowledge) in 1959. Delmore Schwartz was still riding a crest, the golden boy of the literary scene--a position he had commanded ever since the appearance of his first collection of stories and poems in 1938. Summer Knowledge won for him both the prestigious Bollingen Prize in Poetry and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award. lronically, indeed tragically, the praise and prizes Schwartz's poems received did not forestall his decline, and this, his poetic testament, proved to be a final one as well. Overcome by mental illness, alienated from his friends and supporters, he disappeared from the literary scene, in the end to die in 1966 in an obscure Broadway hotel. The tragedy of his life pales before the triumph of his art and craft. Selected Poems clearly places him among the foremost poets of his generation.