Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet

Description

Clear, precise, graceful...(Atlas') biographical style makes the book read with the pleasure of a good novel.--Leonard Michaels, The New York Times Book Review

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Customer Reviews

Bipolar Disorder and James Atlas' biography of Delmore Schwartz
James Atlas provides an impressive description of Delmore Schwartz, the brilliant and precociously honored midcentury poet. He also captures the sad theme of the poet's life, his decline in health and talent and funtioning. Atlas' faithful and unnerving accuracy in portrait of DS's personal and professional universe as it was destroyed by what today would be termed bipolar disorder is, inadvertently, an excellent and objective case study. The developing paranoia of Schwartz's thinking, the disordering of his emotions, the ever brilliant but increasingly errant opinions and behavior over time eventually destroyed him, reduced him to obscurity, and brought him into conflict with those most interested in helping him, such as Saul Bellow. Atlas has a first rate understanding of the literary currents of that era, and of the academic environments where Schwartz also sojourned from time to time, and plants Delmore Schwartz firmly in those vibrant milieu. Also of his interest is his ability to convey Delmore's rather characteristic fascination, expressed in letters and conversation, with the personal lives of his various progenitors, such as T.S. Elliot. A great deal of incidental information is treated smoothly, and in paragraph after paragraph this book gives a personalized, immediate portrait of Delmore's daily goings on, his magical conversation, his idiosyncratic relations with others, his reactions to reviews, his illogical feuds and love affairs, his personal musings and anticipated vendettas. This books is as entertaining and captive as a good novel. So accurately a portrayal of real life by the moment, it seems to stand alone, even from its subject matter, the fatally gifted Delmore Schwartz, who lived out the American dream of self-destructing genius. For an understanding of that era, as well as a subtle, unnerving study of the disintegrative effect of bipolar disorder before there was any good standard treatment, the book is essential reading and should be studied not only by students of literature but of abnormal behavior. Damon LaBarbera, Ph.D.

2009-09-19 (Florida) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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Balanced and Insightful
Delmore Schwartz's legacy has become the one he dreaded most-that he never lived up to his potential, despite his early successes. Considered one of the most promising of the intellectual Partisan Review gang of 1930's New York, after his warmly received debut with the poetry and prose collection "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," Delmore started a long alienating decline into drinking, drugs and paranoia.
James Atlas writes with great appreciation for Delmore's talent and personality, but also honestly addresses the flaws that drove him to destruction. I read this biography after reading Saul Bellow's excellent "Humboldt's Gift," which includes the thinly fictionalized retelling of Delmore's breakdown. In his book, Atlas recreates the era Delmore helped to define, by showing the relationships between him and other leading figures of his times. Delmore had contacts that ranged from TS Eliot to Lou Reed, and for a time he was considered the voice of his generation. Atlas supports the true genius Delmore was, despite the poet's emotional problems. Atlas never patronizes or makes excuses for his subject in this cautionary tale.

2004-10-10 | Symbol Maker (Phoenix AZ) | Helpful Votes: 9 | Rating: 5

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In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories

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• ISBN13: 9780811206808
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Customer Reviews

The despair of damaged dreams
As an undergraduate English major/graduate in the 70's, I'm surprised we were never exposed to these compelling, albeit, dark stories. I expected these to be more about Jewish culture in NY in the generation prior to the great migration. And that is definitely a subtext, but there none of the ritualistic religious nature that one usually ascribes to the rich tradition of Jewish American literature Rather these stories seemed more tragic than the ebullience that one might expect of group that, at least for some, realized the American dream quicker than any other ethnic group that was involved in the greatest wave in American History. Nevertheless, the wealth and fame that some of these characters momentarily gained- and often lost, seems more of a burden and quite illusory. In this sense Schwartz's works reminded me much of Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," and, to a lesser extent, "Tender is The Night," although not anywhere nearly as opulent or effete. But there is the downward mobility, partially as a result of the great depression, and the unrealistic notion that wealth is a constant, somewhat transcendent state. These stories are usually dark, and rife with alienated and/or broken characters (The Baumann's, Seymour, Rudyard Bell's circle). Perhaps it is the fate that often befalls the children of Type A, high achieving, families (here first generation immigrants- the religious tradition seems secondary), who often feel entitled and lack the drive of their parents, and either become wannabe's artists, and here, cynical intellectuals, in an age (and country?) that had no use for committed, free thinking, intellectuals; or these children of privilege become just lazy and marginally functional wastrels.

There is a lot of anger here, but for exactly what one is never entirely sure. Perhaps poor rearing, a denial of tradition, historical discontinuity...Whatever, Schwartz's character's rank with Kafka's and Camus (Joseph K (of "The Trial"), and Merseault (of "The Stranger") respectively)in their nihilistic self absorption but Schwartz doesn't quite rise to the metaphysical level of the European's mentioned. To read, these stories are engrossing, well crafted, but profoundly depressing. And, unfortunately, like his characters Schwartz a possibly more tragic fall than his characters in later life. It's a shame because Schwartz's prose, and insights into the flimsy nature or the American dream are really only matched by Fitzgerald, but here there is no intimations of a gilded, fanciful, age; rather we see the the dark underbelly of the American "rags to riches" archetype; glimpses that are even as powerful, and relevant, seventy to eighty years later.

2010-03-22 (Cambridge, Ma) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Incredible story
I've never had this experience before, or since. It is autumn of 1964. I am a college freshman, sitting on my bed reading the story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities." My roommate and a few other dorm mates walk into the room and call my name, but I don't hear them, so lost am I in the story. Finally, someone nudges my arm. I look up--and the story, which had been unrolling before my eyes, is gone! I'm back in my college dorm room, no longer in the movie theater in the story. I had not even been aware that I was reading--I was IN the story, I was there, experiencing it, not just reading it--and for a few moments, I didn't know what had happened or where I was. Repeated readings never quite duplicated that first experience, but the story remains very powerful, very moving, very involving.

2005-05-24 (Ocean County, New Jersey) | Helpful Votes: 11 | Rating: 5

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The minor masterpiece
This collection of stories is a minor masterpiece. As other Amazon reviewers have pointed out Schwartz is not much attended to these days, not much read. At one time he seemed to be the great promise of American writing. The sad tale of how he lost it and died young is now a part of his legend. In these stories he shows originality and invention. The unforgettable movie scene in ' In Dreams Begin Responsibilities' where the child watching the courtship of his parents, hearing his father propose yells out at the screen ' Don't do it. Don't do it' is funny and deeply sad at once. Schwarz's Brooklyn world was one in which family frustrations and tensions seem to put reality itself on edge. It is Schwartz after all who is really responsible for the famous ' Paranoids too have real enemies'. Whether the persecutor was himself or not , they got him young. Before this he wrote these wonderful stories which hopefully will have a larger place in the American canon in the years to come.

2005-01-20 | Shalom Freedman (Jerusalem,Israel) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Schwartz's Gift
This collection of stories is graced by two introductions and lives up to every superlative. Irving Howe and biographer James Atlas note for the reader Delmore Schwartz's unfailing ear for the idiom of his parents' generation. Each of the stories is a masterpiece and competes, in terms of quality, with the Schwartz poetry. Having read James Atlas's biography of Delmore Schwartz this reader thinks of tragic waste and pain when thinking of Schwartz. And yet, and yet, when one considers the brilliance of these stories, the fact that his mere existence inspired the wonderful novel HUMBOLDT'S GIFT by Saul Bellow, and that he evoked intense loyality from his students the picture shifts to a life of immense achievement not disproportionate to his evident gift. This New Directions Paperback has a compelling photograph on the cover.

2003-08-22 (Carneys Point, NJ USA) | Helpful Votes: 6 | Rating: 5

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Brilliant
The best of the stories in here are brilliant. The dialogue is great, as well as the reflective passages. That a mediocre short story writer like Raymond Carver is lauded, while Schwartz is relatively obscure, shows that the cream does NOT rise to the top. I've read passages of these stories a number of times. I can't praise them highly enough.

2000-08-29 | Helpful Votes: 10 | Rating: 5

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Selected Poems Summer Knowledge: Summer Knowledge (New Directions Paperbook, 241)

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Customer Reviews

Hail The Kingdom of Poetry
I was first drawn to Schwartz via Saul Bellow's book Humboldts Gift. Although his rise and fall may be sad, what I am struck by here is the breadth of his poetry. As he says in his poem "The Kingdom of Poetry: "Poetry is quick as tigers, clever as cats, vivid as oranges". In his work, there are dark passages as "The Heavy Bear that goes with me" on the clumsiness of physical body. In contrast, there is the joyous morning song of "A small score" with song of crickets and the bubble of birds. Throughout there is the juxtaposition of classical images, as in "Plato's cave" and modern sensibility of the soul. In the longer series of poems Coriolanus and His Mother, the Roman characters of Brutus, and Marcius are interspersed with Freud and a semblance of standup comedy. I recommend this book, for its diversity and depth ... some of the images have remained with me over a decade now.

Those who have read his short stories "In Dreams begin responsibilities" will enjoy the twist of the words in the selection of poems in the section "The Dreams which begin in responsibilities".

2000-08-11 (Frankfort, Kentucky) | Helpful Votes: 12 | Rating: 5

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A wonderful poet, lost to our age
Delmore Schwartz was well recognized in his day, but has since lapsed into obscurity. His range of style is enormous, and his talent is superior. I recommend this work to anybody who is interested in poetry as the mainstay of a reading diet. It is truly outstanding. I don't know how I managed to earn a bachelor's degree in poetry without ever having read Delmore Schwartz. I hope that there are others like him waiting to be found . . .

1998-12-14 (State College, PA USA) | Helpful Votes: 22 | Rating: 5

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Last and Lost Poems (New Directions Paperbook)

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Customer Reviews

Thanks to Robert Phillips for making these poems available
The remarkable thing is that Schwartz kept writing great poetry, despite alcohol and a solitary life. The poems may not have the same subject or form as those in "Summer Knowledge", being more free and more sentimental (more like Whitman), but he was still producing good poems. For example in the 1965 poem Spring: "The earth, just like a schoolgirl, memorizes Poems, so many poems..." Schwartz was still interested in the Kingdom of poetry, for example: " Unless ye be as a little child ye cannot enter the kingdom of poetry". The Studies of Narcissus provide an innovative twist on the familiar story, that looking into a stream provided a changing image on oneself. Knowing about the years of drug and alcohol abuse, these lines from the 1958 poem seemed particularly poignant:
"afraid of every little death,
... or sickened by the terror of new hope,
or certain, again, that every death of any hope
Concludes all hope and makes the body's death
More desirable than the recurrent torment of the years."

2003-09-12 (Frankfort, Kentucky) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 4

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The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets (Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Sylvia Plath)

Description

"One of the most promising young poet-critics in America" (Los Angeles Times) examines a revolutionary generation of poets.

Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Delmore Schwartz formed one of the great constellations of talent in American literature. In the decades after World War II, they changed American poetry forever by putting themselves at risk in their poems in a new and provocative way. Their daring work helped to inspire the popular style of poetry now known as "confessional." But partly as a result of their openness, they have become better known for their tumultuous lives—afflicted by mental illness, alcoholism, and suicide—than for their work. This book reclaims their achievement by offering critical "biographies of the poetry"—tracing the development of each poet's work, exploring their major themes and techniques, and examining how they transformed life into art.

An ideal introduction for readers coming to these major American poets for the first time, it will also help veteran readers to appreciate their work in a new light. 6 illustrations.

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Customer Reviews

The Surgeon's Gift: Inspiration and Clarity
Adam Kirsch takes his title "The Wounded Surgeon" from T. S. Eliot's poem "East Coker":

"The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part."

In his introduction, Kirsch explains: "T.S. image evokes the resolve, not to say heroism, that these poets displayed by submitting their most intimate and painful experiences to the objective discipline of art. . . . But the suffering that afflicted this group of poets becomes significant only because they examined it with the surgeon's rigor, detachment, and skill" (p. xi).

Kirsch does the same--examines with "rigor, detachment and skill"--the body of these six poets' lives and works. His close readings deepen our understanding of how their lives and work intertwined, influenced, and yes, (as the subtitle says) transformed each other.

Lowell, Bishop, Berryman, Jarrell, Schwartz, and Plath never had a better reader--certainly not in one place. Each chapter illumines the other as Kirsch patiently explores his thesis and shows the rise and (and in the case of Schwartz) the fall of their talents.

Kirch shows their education and work in the context of the literary movements of the time--modernism and The New Criticism. These six poets scrambled a path through Moderism to a new form of poetic expression that would stamp itself on generations of poets to come. This new way of writing allowed the breath and messiness of life to come inside the poem, not be held aloof and at bay outside.

Personally, I especially enjoyed his chapter on Elizabeth Bishop ("Everything only connected by 'and'and 'and'") as Kirch elucidates Bishop's search to "contain loss in art, the scream in the clang." I came away with a profound appreciation of Bishop as craftsperson (maker), poet, person, and woman...and, can now take these insights back to reading her work.

I also found inspiration and greater clarity for my own work from reading this book. What greater gift can a writer ask?

--Janet Grace Riehl,Sightlines: A Poet's Diary

2006-06-15 | riehlife.com, Village Wisdom for the 21st Century (St. Louis, MO) | Helpful Votes: 8 | Rating: 5

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This Derivative Book is Less than Groundbreaking
Anyone who has read the scholarship on these poets knows that there is really nothing original here. Either Kirsch has not done his homework, or, more likely, he has assimilated much of the relevant schoalrship without acknowedging it in this sparsely documented book. I was excited about this book because I thought it would be a good introduction to some good poets for the general reader. It may well be I'm not the audience for this book, but I noticed that most of the insights had been expressed before by others and more convincingly. This is middle-of-the-road, indeed middling, literary journalism. Kirsch's claims are modest, but he is not--he reinvents the wheel and passes it off as his own singular wisdom at his best and as the wisdom of the ages at his worst.

2006-04-07 (Statesboro, GA USA) | Helpful Votes: 7 | Rating: 1

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Not a poet or critic
I have little to no experience with poetry criticism and little appreciation for modern poetry. I was hoping this book would provide me with some education so I could appreciate poetry to a greater extent. Well, it did that and more. I found the book very interesting. Although a "dense" read (I read many sections more than once to understand them), I found it worth my time. I came away with an understanding of these poets and how to read their, and others', poetry. I found the analyses to be straightforward and not full of a lot of insider jargon. Although I have no sense of how much the author's comments are revisionist, repetitive of prior work, or new; I found them to be well-substantiated and supported by some wonderful examples of poems.

2005-08-02 | avid reader (Long Beach, CA USA) | Helpful Votes: 11 | Rating: 4

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Poetic Purging
Adam Kirsch has written an interesting 'surgical procedure' in the THE WOUNDED SURGEON: he defends the so-called 'Confessional Poets' Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Delmore Schwartz whose work from 1940 through the 1970s, praising "the resolve, not to say heroism, that these poets displayed by submitting their most intimate and painful experiences to the objective discipline of art."

In clear and at all times illuminating prose Kirsch examines each of these six poets and relates the personal lives that influenced their major works. Not a gossip column this, but an erudite exploration of how pain and death and disappointment and tragedy of all manner drove these poets to validate their own sorrows and rage rather that imagining those feelings or assigning them to fictitious personages.

While most everyone knows the life and times and resulting poetry of Sylvia Plath (endless biographies and films have seen to that), few of the others' lives are understood. Kirsch sets the record straight and in doing so makes lucid some of the more obtuse works included in this book.

Some would argue that Kirsch's thesis goes on too long, but in getting into the minds and hearts of poets can be a lengthy process. Kirsch has done a fine job of study on these six poets and lets us see how their art transformed their lives by their confessional poetry. Grady Harp, June 05

2005-06-01 (Los Angeles, CA United States) | Helpful Votes: 13 | Rating: 4

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Portrait of Delmore: Journals and Notes of Delmore Schwartz, 1939-1959

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