Ben Mazer Writes About Delmore Schwartz

Mazer is the editor of The Uncollected Delmore Schwartz. Literary Hub excerpts the volume's introduction, which charts Schwartz's rise to prominence and tragic demise. "In Schwartz’s poetry," writes Mazer, "knowledge and history are obtained through the self: 'the development of the historical sense and the awareness of experience which originate in psychoanalysis are two aspects of the view of existence which is natural to a modern human being.'" More: 

And of course what could provide more of a historical sense, a sense of being transformative in history, than to discover that oneself, the son of Jewish immigrants, is a great poet who is writing great poems in the English language?

Delmore came to Cambridge in the Fall of 1935 to study Philosophy under Alfred North Whitehead. It was while at Harvard that Delmore suddenly wrote an unprecedented series of poems, verse dramas, short stories, reviews, and essays, and began to send these out to the magazines. The first hit was dead center. In the spring of 1936 his verse play “Choosing Company” was published in The New Caravan (the anthology in which he first read Hart Crane nine years earlier). His professors David Prall and F.O. Matthiessen praised this work highly, and it was singled out for praise in a review of the anthology in the New York Times Book Review.

In Scene One, a Radio speaks in characteristically Delmorean imagery and rhetoric, with an Audenesque lisp:

Here is this young man before the looking-glass.
What is he here for? It is something much more
Than his own face. It is the moving picture
Grave in his mind, of all things the most serious,
His picture of himself, which is cached within,
Engraved in the gash, the welt, the wound which is self.
It is no photograph, but sensitive as the violin,
Strung on his nerves and by thick skin kept safe.
No one but its owner may view it and laugh,
Its seasons are hope and despair and the future:
It trembles like a pool, being made of belief
—But is it, after all, such an extraordinary picture?

Delmore, in the classic tradition of the Harvard outsider poet, and like his hero Eliot, turned down his degree. He declined to take his Masters because he could or would not pay off his fines at the Widener Library. He was restless to write and publish and achieve literary fame, and had reams of manuscripts under his belt after his time at Harvard.

Read on at Literary Hub.