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Introduction Notes Introduction 1. Delmore Schwartz, Last & Lost Poems, ed. Robert Phillips (New York: Vanguard Press, 1979), 4. The poem is dated 1954, but it gathers preoccupations from over a decade earlier. 2. Walt Whitman, “Preface 1855—Leaves of Grass, First Edition,” in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 616. 3. James Atlas, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976). The rock star Lou Reed, a former student, dedicated the song “European Son,” on the album The Velvet Underground & Nico, to Schwartz. 4. Delmore Schwartz, Genesis (New York: New Directions, 1943), 5. 5. Delmore Schwartz, “America! America!” in In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories, 20. 6. Delmore Schwartz, “The Fiction of Ernest Hemingway: Moral Historian of the American Dream” (1955), in Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, 271. 7. Schwartz, “The Fiction of Ernest Hemingway,” 272. 8. Howe, “Foreword to Atlas, ed.,” in In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, and Other Stories, vii; Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (London: Secker and Warburg, 1978), 25. 9. Cited in DS & JL Letters, 47. 10. Atlas, Delmore Schwartz, 154. Eliot regretted that he was unable to bring out a British edition of Schwartz’s poems. 11. Atlas, Delmore Schwartz, 129. Wallace Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1981), December 27, 1940, 382. 12. John Berryman, The Dream Songs (London: Faber, 1990) (149), 168. 13. Delmore Schwartz, “Views of a Second Violinist” (1949), in Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, 25. 14. He was also film editor of The New Republic between 1955 and 1957. 15. Howe, “Foreword,” x. 152 l Notes 16. William Phillips, A Partisan View: Five Decades of the Politics of Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1983), 75. 17. Lionel Trilling, “The Function of the Little Magazines,” in The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 95. 18. Atlas, Delmore Schwartz, 141. 19. Benjamin Schreier, “Jew Historicism: Delmore Schwartz and Over- determination,” Prooftexts, 27, no. 3 (2007), 514. 20. Berryman, The Dream Songs (147), 166. 21. David Lehman, “Delmore, Delmore: A Mournful Cheer,” in The Line Forms Here (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 74. 22. Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (London: Penguin, 1976), 1, 2, 11. 23. Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, 6. 24. Berryman, The Dream Songs (155, 151, 150), 174, 170, 169. 25. Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (London: Faber, 2003), 533. 26. Dwight MacDonald, “Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966),” in Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, xx; Karl Shapiro, “The Death of Randall Jarrell,” in Creative Glut: Selected Essays of Karl Shapiro, ed. Robert Phillips (Oxford: Oxford Publicity Partnership, 2004), 176. 27. Shapiro, “The Death of Randall Jarrell,” 176. 28. Kazin, New York Jew, 24. 29. Catherine Fitzpatrick, disentangling the confusion courted by Schwartz’s con- temporaries in taking his life and work to be coextensive, argues that “Schwartz was a writer whose greatest literary successes came in his treatments of fail- ure.” Fitzpatrick’s argument calls to mind Denis Donoghue’s conviction that there is a specifically American style of failure, and that “much American literature achieves its vitality by a conscientious labor to transform the mere state of failure into the artistic success of forms and pageants.” See Catherine Fitzpatrick, “Life, Work, Failure: Delmore Schwartz,” Cambridge Quarterly 42, no. 2 (2013): 112, and Denis Donoghue, “The American Style of Failure,” The Sewanee Review 82, no. 3 (Summer 1974): 408. 30. Berryman, The Dream Songs (150), 169. 31. John Ashbery “In Discussion with Al Filreis, 26 March 2002,” Pennsound. http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Ashbery.php. 32. Charles Simic, “All Gone Into the Dark,” London Review of Books, September 9, 2010, 12. 33. Kazin, New York Jew, 25. 34. Anthony Hecht, “The Anguish of the Spirit and the Letter,” Hudson Review 12, no. 4 (Winter 1959–1960): 595. 35. “The Art of Poetry No. 16,” Paris Review 53 (Winter 1972). http://www .theparisreview.org/interviews/4052/the-art-of-poetry-no-16-john-berryman; Berryman, The Dream Songs (156), 175. 36. Ashbery, The Heavy Bear: Delmore Schwartz’s Life Versus His Poetry: A Lecture Delivered at the Sixty-Seventh General Meeting of the English Literary Society Notes l 153 of Japan on 21st May 1995 (Tokyo: English Literary Society of Japan, 1996), 3. Among the others that Ashbery appears to have had in mind are John Wheelwright, Paul Goodman, David Schubert, and early Randall Jarrell. 37. Ashbery, The Heavy Bear, 23. 38. LL, “Introduction,” xiv. 39. There have been just three book-length studies of Schwartz’s writing—Richard McDougall’s Delmore Schwartz (1974), Robert Deutsch’s The Poetry of Delmore Schwartz (published posthumously in 2003, some 20 years after Deutsch’s death), and Edward Ford’s A Re-evaluation of the Works of American Writer Delmore Schwartz, 1913–1966 (2003). McDougall and Deutsch offer chrono- logical readings of the major works, though these are sometimes cursory and each underplays the thematic and stylistic unity of Schwartz’s writing. Ford’s indiscriminating paean, meanwhile, is undermined by the author’s overidenti- fication of himself with his subject. 1 “The Greatest Thing in North America”: “International Consciousness” or “The Isolation of Modern Poetry?” 1. Of all Schwartz’s peers, it was perhaps F. O. Matthiessen who addressed the question most directly, visiting Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1948 to con- duct seminars on American Literature—a diplomatic as well as an educative enterprise—and explicitly endorsing Schwartz’s belief in Europe as “the great- est thing in North America.” Matthiessen recounts the experience in From the Heart of Europe. 2. William Phillips and Philip Rahv, “Literature in a Political Decade,” in New Letters in America, ed. Horace Gregory and Eleanor Clark (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937), 172–180. Cited in Terry A. Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle, 1934–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 92. 3. Cited in Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 4. 4. Christopher Hitchens, “Bravo, Old Sport,” London Review of Books, April 4, 1991. 5. Leon Trotsky, “Leon Trotsky to André Breton,” Partisan Review 6, no. 2 (Winter 1939): 127. 6. See, for example, Edmund Wilson’s piece on “Flaubert’s Politics” in Partisan Review 4, no. 1 (December 1937). “In the case of Taine and Sainte-Beuve,” Wilson says, Flaubert “came to deplore their preoccupation in their criticism with the social aspects of literature at the expense of all its other values; but he himself always seems to see humanity in social terms and historical perspective” (13). The Partisan Review editors would not publish literary works on the basis of their social ideology, but this does not mean that they would resist criticizing it in those terms. 154 l Notes 7. William Phillips and Philip Rahv, “Editorial Statement,” Partisan Review 4, no. 1 (December 1937): 4. 8. Irving Howe, “The New York Intellectuals,” in Decline of the New, 223. 9. Ibid., 223. 10. Quoted in Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals, 182. 11. Delmore Schwartz, Delmore Schwartz Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 7, Folder 425. 12. Delmore Schwartz, Letters of Delmore Schwartz, ed. Robert Phillips (Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1984), 101. 13. Jim Keller, “Delmore Schwartz’s Strange Times,” in Reading The Middle Generation Anew, ed. Eric Haralson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 158. 14. “The Poet as Poet” (1939), In Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, 80. Schwartz’s emphasis. 15. Delmore Schwartz, “An Unwritten Book,” In Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, 84, 86–87. 16. Helen Vendler, “Dear Delmore,” New York Review of Books, April 11, 1985. Nor is internationalism’s worth as self-evident today as it was for Schwartz. Charles Bernstein, for example, criticizes its tendency to remove poems “from the local contexts that give them meaning” and to undervalue “the untranslatable par- ticularities not only of given poems but also of the selection of poets.” (“Poetics of the Americas,” Modernism/Modernity 3, no. 3 [1996]: 3). 17. Even more conspicuously, perhaps, since he is discussing his own country, Schwartz feels obliged, in a discussion of Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, to say something of “the immense distance between the region of the critic and that of the author” (“The Fiction of William Faulkner,” in Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, 283). 18. “T. S. Eliot as the International Hero” (1945), in Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, 123. 19. “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood, 41. 20. Delmore Schwartz Papers, Box 6, Folder 359. 21. Delmore Schwartz Papers, Box 4, Folder 245. 22. “The Vocation of the Poet in the Modern World” (1951), in Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, 22. 23. Delmore Schwartz, “The Present State of Poetry,” in Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, 48. Perhaps it wasn’t so “clear and explicit” then, but each of the writ- ers considered in F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941)—the study that established the nineteenth-century US canon as we now know it—had a keen sense of vistas beyond their own nation. See, for example, Wai Chee Dimock’s Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time for a discussion of Thoreau’s simultaneous reading of the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, and other “scriptures of the several nations” (23). See also Colleen Glenney Boggs’s consideration of Whitman and translation in Transnationalism and American Literature: Literary Translation, 1773–1892, and Paul Giles on how Hawthorne and Melville read Notes l 155 Dante, Chaucer, medieval Islamic legend, Shakespeare, and Ruskin (The Global Remapping of American Literature, 97–107).
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