University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

The Poetry Of Delmore Schwartz

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The Poetry Of Delmore Schwartz

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Content This dissertation has been
microfilmed exactly as received
69-5047
DEUTSCH, Robert Harmon, 1915-
THE POETRY OF DELMORE SCHWARTZ.
University of Southern California, Ph.D., 1968
Language and Literature, modern
University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan
Copyright © by
ROBERT HARMON DEUTSCH
1 9 6 9
THE POETRY OF DELMORE SCHWARTZ
by
Robert Harmon Deutsch
A Dissertation Presented to the
' FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
August 1968
UNIVERSITY O F SOU TH ERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 9 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, written by
Robert Harmon Deutsch
under the direction of h.h§... Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by the Graduate
School, in partial fulfillment of requirements
for the degree of
D O C T O R OF P H IL O S O P H Y
Dean
August 1968
D ate...................
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION ..................................... 1
Chapter
I. IN DREAMS BEGIN RESPONSIBILITIES ........... 9
"Coriolanus and His Mother"
"The Repetitive Heart"
Separate Lyrics
"Dr. Bergen's Belief"
II. SHENANDOAH AND "PARIS AND HELEN"........... 124
III. GENESIS................................... 151
IV. VAUDEVILLE FOR A PRINCESS................. 183
V. SUMMER KNOWLEDGE........................... 205
CONCLUSION....................................... 238
BIBLIOGRAPHY 250
INTRODUCTION
Delmore Schwartz is perhaps one of the five finest
poets of his generation— the others being Roethke, Low
ell, Berryman, and Jarrell. No modern poet gives voice
so distinctly to the agonies of awareness it is possible
to suffer in a big city in America, yet this voice never
became fragmented; it was whole, or it broke. To under
stand the nature of this inflexibility and its effect on
the poet's style, the relationship between the poet, his
poetry, its subject matter, and the reader has to be
studied.
From this, and from some knowledge as to what it is
that makes a poem modern, arises the concept of focus— a
helpful tool for approaching the work of contemporary
writers. The discussion assigned this term includes a
description of the shift in the sense of reality that has
occurred at least since the time of Descartes. Thus, it
is possible to describe the source of Schwartz's stylis
tic problems as contingent, in part, on his stubborn
insistence on the Cartesian focus.
Other poets, today, are using a shorter focus them
Schwartz, which results in fundamental changes in style
which are clearly modern. Such flexibility and, in addi
tion, not so heavy a reliance on old stabilities, four
square systems, would have required of Schwartz greater
ease in relating to others, less of a feeling of isola
tion than he possessed. But the problem of alienation,
of separateness, is indigenous to the time, and Schwartz
is, therefore, a painfully and significantly articulate
poet of the present.
This work will seek to discover the best means for
describing and analyzing Schwartz's stylistic dilemma, to
uncover, as well, the causes behind the change in his
later style, and, also, to find the reasons for calling
this change deterioration. A full explication of
Schwartz's poetry has been undertaken with the feeling
that the exploratory method will not only reveal with
intimacy and accuracy, but that it will also dramatize a
poetic life of violent dedication.
Overall, the effort will be to connect the incorpor-
ative mode (knowledge and experience as objects to be
consumed) with Schwartz's unwillingness to submit to and
develop in, a tradition, and with his inability to believe
and to allow belief to contain and structure his poetry.
Each of there is a contributing factor in the ultimate
dissolution of his poetic line. Though this is the
thesis, it is hoped that, at the end, the reader becomes
aware that he has seen unfurled one of the classically
great romantic modes of the human spirit.
Schwartz published five books of poetry and the
titles to these books name the chapter headings of "The
Poetry of Delmore Schwartz." His first book made by far
the greatest impact and is also given the most detailed
consideration here. It is from the poems of In Dreams
Begin Responsibilities1 that one makes one's freshest and
most striking discoveries. Therefore, each division of
the book is given a separate section in this first chapter.
Chapter I is titled In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.
The first section then is headed "Coriolanus and His
Mother," and concerns itself with this philosophical,
psychological narrative poem, possibly the only example
of its hybrid genre. In it, one sees that Coriolanus*
concern with self is sealed by his reliance on the image;
^Norfolk, Conn., 1939.
the portrait of a narcissist is revealed. This section
points up the reason for Schwartz's identification with
Coriolanus, and analyzes the kind of hostility shared by
these men— the one, Coriolanus, the other, Schwartz, the
poet, as he appears in his poetry— both in a sense, fic
titious.
The second section treats a set of eleven poems which
Schwartz gathered under the title "The Repetitive Heart,"
with a subtitle "In Imitation of the Fugue." Among these
are some of his best-known poems. The combination of
despair and disbelief is apparent in this set of terrify
ingly honest poems. The fugal subject, the theme, of
"no solace," is repeated throughout, and careful exegesis
shows the originality, power, and resource with which
Schwartz builds this black, fugal texture.
The third section is titled "Lyrics"; here, isolated
for study, are certain lyric poems considered representa
tive of those in Schwartz's first book which are not
structured by an overall form or aim, or gathered into
any special section. These are the poems that clearly
show the Yeats/Eliot/Auden influence but they also convey
Schwartz's individual tone and rhythm; they are tight,
questioning, and magical, and they show up very strikingly
as hard bright seeds when contrasted with the overblown
oaks of his last poems.
The final section of Chapter I is headed "Dr. Ber
gen 1s Belief," and deals with the verse play which is the
final work in this first book. Schwartz investigates the
problems arising from the need to believe; his method is
to set up a straw belief which he then knocks down. He
seems to be taking seriously what he does not make seri
ous in his work. The attempt to express irony and absurd
ity in a matter very close to his heart and to protect
his own feelings at the same time becomes clear in the
analysis.
Chapter II, headed Shenandoah and "Paris and Helen,"
gives consideration to the only other verse plays written
by Schwartz. In the study of Shenandoah,^ two of
Schwartz's favorite themes are discussed— the magical
power of naming and of names, and the overwhelming influ
ence of "origins"— one's past including one's forebears.
"Paris and Helen"^ is the last play examined and the
2Norfolk, Conn., 1941.
^In New Directions in Prose and Poetry (Norfolk,
Conn., 1941), pp. 129-138.
critique concerns itself with the other side of Schwartz's
self-consciousness— the voyeur; this is uncovered and
discussed. The comments on Shenandoah, alsof are the
beginnings of a discourse on Schwartz's style which runs
through the remaining chapters.
The third chapter, Genesis, is concerned with
Schwartz's autobiographical prose-poem. Here are revealed
the themes which obsess him throughout all his work— the
freedom of the will— choice as against the power of the
past, the compulsive worry about each detail of the past,
the need for self-consciousness layered on to self-con
sciousness, the failure of each promise of joy the world
offers, the consciousness of "being-in-the-world"; all of
these are searched out by Schwartz and thus, as the
chapter here shows, the genesis of his emotional disturb
ance as a poet is traced. The book takes Schwartz up to
his fifth year— time enough for all the significant
traumas!
Chapter IV is a gloss and criticism of Vaudeville
for a Princess.4 This is shown to be a middle book, a
bridge, really, between his first or early poems and his
4New York, 1950.
last poems. In this book, Schwartz puts on an objective,
social mask, seems to forget himself in favor of forays
into the world; his comments, therefore, seem more mature,
older, prosier. Here he is buttressing himself with
tight formal construction. Even the confessional part of
the book— a set of thirty-five poems— is, by and large,
written as tightly as possible, using sonnet form.
Summer Knowledge, as the concluding chapter of this
study, offers a fairly detailed exegesis of Schwartz's
c
last poems. It demonstrates that Schwartz is attempting
to treat the most intimate matters at middle distance
without any governing tradition. The result, first, is a
prosy line that grows looser with use, plus a phrasing
which, seeking a wider and wider inclusion of opposites,
loses meaning with increased speed like the leak in an
overfull balloon. It points out— but only implicitly by
use of quotation, never mentioning the clinical tern—
that the isolation of the ego in a sea of suspicion, the
preoccupation with self-hood, the mask of clown and the
mask of irony, the failure of the search for love, the
^Summer Knowledge; New and Selected Poems, 1938-
1958 (Garden City, 1959).
ecstasy-seeking which substitutes for this search and is
named after it, the reliance for development on the
incorporative mode rather than the sympathetic or relat
ing mode, the inability to break out of his cultural
fortress with its closed-system weaponry constructed in
his youth, the ultimate effort to annihilate the self in
music yet retain it in poetry, the failure, at the end,
of the style as well as the man— that all of this is
based in the same rock bottom hostility.
Nevertheless, the last chapter does not sidetrack
appreciation for the successes among Schwartz's last
poems. It places him where he belongs, in the center of
the intellectual, anxiety-ridden, self-self-conscious,
urban world appropriately standing— with the Real and the
Ideal disappointing each other— on the threshold of
Heaven and Hell.
CHAPTER I
IN DREAMS BEGIN RESPONSIBILITIES
The year Delmore Schwartz was graduated £rom high
school was an exceptionally good year for poetry. It was
1930, the year that Ezra Pound published A Draft of 30
Cantos?* T. S. Eliot, Poems 1909-1925?2 Hart Crane, The
A
Bridge?J and Conrad Aiken, John Deth. And the early
thirties continued to be good years. While Schwartz was
an undergraduate at New York University, Allen Tate's
Poems 1928-3l5 appeared, followed by Crane's Collected
Poems6 and William Carlos Williams' Collected Poems
7
1921-31. After graduation xn 1934, Schwartz went on to
1 2
London. London.
^New York.
4
John Deth: A Metaphysical Legend and Other Poems
(New York, 1930).
5New York, 1932. 6New York, 1933.
7New York, 1934.
10
Harvard for his Master's degree and then left his studies
in the spring of 1935. At that time Pound, Eliot, Wal
lace Stevens, and Marianne Moore were all readying new
Q
boohs, Stevens' being Ideas of Order and Miss Moore's
g
Selected Poems.
This is the comparatively immediate context of
Schwartz's first poetry. Of his own generation (Randall
Jarrell, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell)
he was the first to publish a book. In spite of his
brilliant performance and the very high regard in which
he was subsequently held by those whom he respected,10
his reputation did not flourish. Now an overall estimate
of the poetry is in order, not only because of its qual
ity but also because it seems an anomaly, almost a warn
ing.
Whereas Eliot's poetry, in his middle years, tight
ens into the complexity of Four Quartets,11 Schwartz's
8New York, 1936 9New York, 1935.
10Wallace Stevens, for example, in a letter to Elder
Olsen, May 8, 1955, says, "Schwartz seems to me to be the
most gifted of all the younger men." See Holly Stevens
(ed.). Letters of Wallace Stevens (New York, 1966), p.
875.
X1New York, 1943.
work loosens, the understated becomes merely flat, and
12
excited meters of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
("Through hate we guard our love,/ And its distinction's
feiown" [p. 119]) change to the prose rhythms and long
lines of Summer Knowledge1^ ("Possessed and blessed by
the power which flowers as a fountain flowers 1" [p. 215]).
There is an extraordinary distance between his first book
and his last in aim and outcome. Schwartz was a gifted,
serious writer; what account can be given of this change
in his work?
His first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,
contains a short story by the same name, a long poem,
"Coriolanus and His Mother; The Dream of One Perform
ance," a set of eleven poems titled "The Repetitive
Heart," with the subtitle "Eleven Poems in Imitation of
the Fugue Form," twenty-four separate lyric poems, and a
verse drama, "Dr. Bergen's Belief," as heterogeneous a
grouping as possible; yet these apparently diverse works
are bound together, at the very least, in theme and
style. Giving them consideration in the order in which
^Norfolk, Conn., 19 39.
^Garden City, N. Y., 1959.
12
they appear is an operation of discovery, the first piece
revealing themes, attitudes, methods repeated in the
other works. Although deservingly famous, the short story
— since it is not poetry— must be glossed over, but with
the remark that the device used here of the author pre
senting himself dreaming a dream of himself watching a
performance is the basic structural device of the second
piece in the book, "Coriolanus and His Mother."
"Coriolanus and His Mother"
This poem is the presentation of the author's dream
of himself witnessing the performance of a play resembling
Shakespeare's "Coriolanus." Not only is he a part of
the audience, but he participates by providing comment
between the acts. The poem is divided into five "acts"
written in blank verse; in addition, five prose pieces
are included, one between each act. Thus the "poem"
is an amalgam of prose and poetry, another method or
device used more than once by Schwartz in later works.
As the plot of the enacted "Coriolanus" is unrolled, it
is also given evaluation through the comments of the
author attending the dream performance and by the ghosts
13
of great men of the past who are at his side.
Thus, we, the readers, are being treated by Schwartz,
the author (which may be referred to as the first level),
with an art work showing a projection of Schwartz and the
five "influences" (level number two) watching the Shake
spearean drama of "Coriolanus" which takes place on the
stage (level number three). The device marks the tremen
dous emphasis on self-consciousness in this poet. It is
symptomatic, as well, of a kind of urban intellectual
sophistication. Lyric poets like Theodore Roethke and
Dylan Thomas incorporate what ideas they have in the
substance of the lyric poetry, and the poetry is a total
reconstitution— one thing only. Schwartz referred to
Thomas as a poet of one theme,but Thomas might have
seen Schwartz as a bundle of fragmented or, at best
departmentalized, themes.
This is, then, the first poem in his first book, and
it would seem the logical place to begin an inquiry into
the nature and meaning of his poetry. If more space is
devoted to this poem than its quality would seem to
14Conversation with author at the University of
Southern California, 1961.
...... 14
warrant, it is because the lengthy analysis pins down
the original outlines not only of "Coriolanus" but of the
author's personality as well. In addition, it lays bare
fundamental motivations and methods active in all of
Schwartz's work.
Schwartz told a close friend that he completed the
first draft of this poem before he was twenty; allowing
for exaggeration, this is still a very young man's poem.
The young man could have chosen any of several other
Shakespearean plays that would seem, at first glance, of
more interest to him: Hamlet for psychological interest,
or Measure for Measure for its treatment of justice.
Coriolanus has been considered a play about either a
limited military mind15 or an arrogant spoiled aristocrat
16
who got his just deserts. These are nineteenth-century
attitudes; a later analysis sees Coriolanus as Narcissus,
and a still later one shows him inculcated with his
mother's ambitions. Though outwardly martial, he carries
his filial compliance as a weakness which eventually
15Delia Bacon, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shake
speare (London, 1857), pp. 332-561.
15Augustus Rolli, History of Shakespearean Criticism
(Humphrey, 1932), p. 321.
15
causes his death.
In the Schwartz poem, Coriolanus is in part pre
sented as the victim of what is sometimes called an
unresolved Oedipal; there is more emotional incest in the
play than in all the enseamgd sheets of Hamlet. The
relationship of mother and son has far-reaching results.
Coriolanus* nature is such that he either breaks or does
not break. He never bends. When the core of an action
involves the classic problem of personal integrity versus
the rules of society— a problem only temporarily resolved
by the ameliorating or compromising faculty— and when the
fanatic black or white, either-or character of an ideal
istic protagonist undergoes too great a stress, as is the
case here, then the protagonist breaks. For Coriolanus
it is initially a question of equating himself with the
scum of humanity he despises or of maintaining his im
pregnable but idealistic identity. Those who live by the
image die by the image. Coriolanus, insisting on his
unrealistic values, perpetrating the image of himself and
his action like a crime, brings about his own death.
17
Middleton Murray, m History of Shakespearean
Criticism, p. 438.
16
And, it can be pointed out, both his relationship with
Aufidius, to whom he ran from Rome, and his relationship
with his wife point clearly to the powerful Oedipal
inculcation. There is more, and this can be revealed by
a closer look at the text.
First, however, the question, why Coriolanus? must
be asked. Can one, in any fashion, equate Schwartz's
situation with that of Coriolanus? An initial compari
son does reveal glaring resemblances. For one thing, the
Roman is set apart. Though an aristocrat— which in itself
separates him from the general populace— he holds himself
aloof from his own class. Today we might say that he is
alienated. In response to his need for perfection of
personal integrity— his image--he can conform at no point
for the sake of conforming. The assertion of his indi
viduality, which he considers noble, takes precedence
over all considerations. Being alienated, he is alone.
Being nonconformist, he is ostracized. Being publicly
arrogant, he is exiled and, in Rome, narrowly escapes
with his life at the beginning of the play.
Schwartz, one could say, started out with several
counts against him. He was a Jew; he was an intellectual;
he was an artist. This was more than sufficient to
17
alienate him and to give him material for the alienation
theme. In addition, as corollaries, he was excessively
sensitive and distrustful, and was also making a desper
ate effort to build an identity. It was not merely a
personal meaning that he sought; it was a long-term
cultural identity, and he seems to have sought everywhere,
though not deeply in his own Jewish heritage. Yet, this
effort was limited by his unwillingness to submit to a
tradition or to find one in which he felt at home. It
could be said that he suffered from a frustrated sense of
history. As an artist, his adaptation became increasing
ly difficult in a partly anti-intellectual country in
which states of being went down before materialistic and
activist assembly lines. And so he brings to bear on
the drama of "Coriolanus" the participating comments of
Aristotle, Socrates, Marx, Beethoven, and Freud. These
men are names, insights, ideas, ideals to Schwartz; they
are the color of his sensibility, the size and sharpness
of his intellect.
In "Coriolanus," Schwartz endeavors to extend—
beyond the story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities"—
the area and complexity of the identity search. (A more
accurate term might be "identity-making.") It is this
18
effort which yields the picture of the narcissist; The
method also includes the manufacture of cultural loyal
ties for himself reaching back into the literary and
philosophical tradition available to him.
Schwartz was a philosophy major in college, though
he became a teacher of literature; ideas are not only
important to him, they are presented, frequently undi
gested, in the body of his work. He has as strong a
passion for ideas as for poetry and the former are seldom
absorbed into the poetry, transmuted into its body; they
are presented in their own substance and appear in the
flow of his poetic work as pebbles in a stream. Often
they are beautiful, hard, and clear, but just as fre
quently they block the flow. Schwartz is interested in
the perspectives contributed by his culture heroes; these
men are important influences; they help to forge the
modern consciousness of Delmore Schwartz. If one is to
watch the destiny of this consciousness, one should
accept their active role in its formation. And this is
the implication of Schwartz's use of them in his work.
Schwartz dramatizes the importance of these influ
ences, his turning to their teachings for instruction and
advice, by the device of showing them as spectators at
19 "
this drama of "Coriolanus." He sees himself listening to
their conversation, records it carefully. Part of his
blank verse establishes the background situation on the
first level:
Theatre, the place to stare, rustle of program,
Many have come, are being seated. The house
Is full, the audience is distinguished,
And in a box-seat sit five ghosts, and one,
A boy with a gutteral voice full of emotion.
The lights dim, half-darkness now accents
The footlights' glitter before the curtain. The curtain
Rises on the heart of man. (p. 23)
Schwartz begins the account of the action of Shake
speare's play. First Brutus incites the mob, then Mene-
nius, the "canny patrician" (p. 24), addresses the popu
lace. His is the good-fellow attitude which is in con
tradistinction to that of Coriolanus, who scorns them.
Marcius (Coriolanus) has a fine foil in Menenius— the
rigid as opposed to the forgiving, the Platonic as
opposed to the Aristotelian, the one as opposed to the
many— not merely as a pun where it applies to Coriolanus—
the reactionary/conservative as opposed to the liberal/
radical. The set of antitheses can continue indefinitely,
the former (Coriolanus type) standing with the rational
ist against the empiricist, the protective against the
outgoing, standing for form as against content, order as
against expression, for the image against the compromise,
for stability against temperament. The former is apt to
be cold, calculating, defensive, selfish, standoffish—
all except where the value system of the image dictates
the opposite stance, in which case the stance of charity,
generosity, and warmth (qualities yielding no personal
reward) yields a psychic reward because of the fact of
adherence or conformity itself, this being an important
criterion in the value system. In this case, the fact of
pattern alone provides the psychic income, not the con
tent of the pattern. The negative responses on the other
side, characteristics such as sloppiness, lack of selec
tivity, dirt, and disorder are manifested in the masses
in "Coriolanus." Finally, on the one side there are the
"haves," the employers, and on the other side the "have
nots," or at best the union members.
This comprises, really, a prerational "set" which
seems to account for political attitudes with much more
validity them the rationalizations which are given as
argument on issues in political matters. I believe that
it is important to understand this set or perspective, as
vague as it appears, since, ultimately, it will help one
to understand the psychological sleight-of-hand, by which
21
Delmore Schwartz, unconsciously in part, and involved in
just such a predicament as Coriolanus, tried to free
himself. One could say that Schwartz, who was a wonder
fully intelligent and richly gifted man— an intellectual
aristocrat— seeking the development of complex identity
and knowing that his growth could not continue within the
confines of negation and aristocratic rejection, and hav
ing no orthodoxy into which he could fit and on which he
could depend, unwilling or unable to spin out his own in
myth and symbol, intuitively— with more than a touch of
masochism as well as ambition— reached out for a means of
growth. The essential method was to be the attempt to
enfold all that at first repelled his geometric abstrac
tion-making, aristocratic faculties. He sought to incor
porate everything. It is as if Coriolanus, regardless of
his unutterable loathing, put out his beautiful arms to
clasp to his broad and perfect bosom all the blotched,
dirty, and imperfect noggins of the slums of Rome. If
you can1t fight 'em, join 'em, or "nothing is sole or
18
whole that has not been rent." On a deeper level, it
18
William Butler Yeats, "Crazy Jane Walks with the
Bishop," The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (New York,
1949), p. 278.
is a theme in Dostoevsky, and, deeper still, in Christian
ethos but there it is supposed to exist without the ex
tension of the erect ego; there the ego is supine, which
in a certain way could be healthier than if it were not.
For if such an effort is made outside a supporting cul
tural framework, the ego attempting continuous inclusion,
the gambit can result in many kinds of dissolution. This
is looking ahead; it is farther afield than Marcius
Coriolanus, who did not make such an attempt. But Mar
cius dies. And from this Schwartz could have drawn
dangerous conclusions.
At the beginning of the poem Marcius is saved from
the mob Menenius incited by the newsboys shouting that
war is declared, and one great ghost, Marx, makes the first
comment: "So by death's poverty is poverty escaped . . .
War being the state's good health" (p. 26). Then Brutus
and a confederate discuss Marcius as "too proud" (p. 27)
and "Insane, alone in his fantasy. We are not safe until
he's cast aside" (p. 27). Marcius is recognized as dan
gerous. The scene shifts to the sitting room, where
Marcius' mother is introduced. She baldly avows that she
would have preferred Marcius to have been her husband
rather than her son, shifting the nature of his service
to her just sufficiently to introduce the forbidden nature
of her psychological relationship with Marcius. One
might say that she is conscious of this since she makes
the open avowal, "Were he my husband as he is my son/
This would delight me 0 much more . . ." (p. 28) and then
at the end of her speech she refers to him as . .my
son, my spear" (p. 28). Here even the strongest stomach
must turn, for, against the psyche of this woman, a most
repulsive indictment must be made; as Schwartz sees it,
and he probably sees it correctly judging from the authen
ticity of his presentation, Marcius's mother, in calling
her son her spear, is not merely saying that he exists to
act out her aggressions in society; any soldier who would
fight to defend her prerogatives could do that and there
would be no personal relationship at all. But this is
the case of a mother and son, and her symbol is explicit
and truthful. This domineering, aggressive, selfish
woman, would like to implement these qualities (subcon
sciously sexually) and would use her son for that purpose.
It may be questionable taste to mention this, but it is
important to realize in fullest the underlying disdain
on the part of the mother for the boy in the man and the
man in the boy. Awareness of such a psychically crippling
24
mother-and-son relationship helps one understand the
symbols as they are meant to be understood. What could
be more contemptuous, more exploiting, more injurious to
a growing human soul than the subtle purposes that, deep
underneath, guided the harsh upbringing of poor Marcius?
The delicate psyche was subjected to such reductive
treatment that only the deepest feelings of unworthiness
could have resulted, and only the strongest assertion of
worth could counteract this. The assertion in Coriolanus,
of course, is insanely strong— and no wonder!
Schwartz may not have had these conjectures in mind
at the starting point. It is certain, however, that he
moved in this direction during the time of writing; and
he realized, more than most of us, to what depths one
must reach for an understanding of motivation. He has
Freud comment on this scene between Marcius' mother and
his wife:
This is the origin, this, this is the place
Mother in love with son, and son with her.
And his aloneness in the womb began . . . (p. 28)
But Freud says little more of consequence— not that when
historically, he said this for the first time, it was not
of considerable consequence. Marx hastens with the
counterstatement that society shaped Marcius, not his
relationship with his mother. In the nineteen thirties,
during the period when "Coriolanus" was being written, a
young man watched Marx on his way out the back door and
Freud coming in the front. It is most understandable
that Schwartz wishes to present these as influences and
let them wrangle about the problems that one way or
another beset him.
Marcius, alone, wins the battle. He alone enters
the enemy walls, is closed in, comes out again and calls
his men forward to victory. "Hating all men, he was
fulfilled in war" (p. 30). Yet this, the hate element, is
only part of a whole. Later, in exile from Rome, Marcius
headed directly for his major foe, Aufidius— "for hate,
love, and desire concentrate their blaze" (p. 31). One
must not lose sight of the love and the desire.
Marcius' oscillation between enormous gratification
at the idolatry offered him on his return to Rome and the
shame he feels at having this gratification revealed,
causes him to feign modesty and to refuse the money
offered him. A man who wants fame shows that he places
great faith in his fellow men, in their thought and being.
No amount of arrogance can hide the fact that if others
didn't matter, fame and praise would not matter. He
26
refuses the money:
And the refusal may dress his nakedness,
His sheer delight, his shame to be delighted,
— His sort of heart to depend on another onel (p. 32)
The all-devouring, all-encompassing vision of him
self can not accept the material reward; such an accept
ance would demean by implication the pure autonomy— the
Godhead, in fact— of his vision. The rage at the origi
nal frustrations and deprivations in his early life, this
rage that afterward was displaced from the mother, as
target, to the rest of mankind, can be quieted, if at all
and then briefly, but the people giving back to Marcius
his exact vision of himself, and they do this simply by
according him their fullest agreement. If all of nature
agrees with him, which is the condition of the infant or
of God, then he achieves a simulacrum, of the former,
gingerbreaded with feelings of being the latter.
There is no point in adding detail. The purpose
here is to try to understand the mechanics of Schwartz's
identification with Coriolanus, his use of the poem; in
some places the pat identification falls short, in many
it is illuminating. The qualities that compose the
opposition between the utile and the aesthetic perspec
tives, Caesar and the artist, are interestingly listed in
.......27.
the opening chapter of Kenneth Burke's Counterstatement.19
It is old hat that the poet as maker shares a kind of
creativity with God, that he must reject stereotype, and
must be cautious about rendering unto Caesar; and it is
easy to see how a young poet, insistent on cleansing his
work of dead matter, cliches, superfluities, the lifeless
and the automatic, anxious to present only what is truly
living, must drive for identification with the purity in
Coriolanus' assertion of integrity. Only the strongest
and purest and most continuous defense- against the
encroachment of compromise holds off the forces of death,
maintains the living soul. With this in mind one invari
ably sees the hero assailed on all sides by forces of
disintegration; no victory must rely more on the strength
of the feelings for nobility than the victory of the
poet.
It is not necessary to extend the parallel between
Marcius and the poet beyond the facts that Schwartz had.
no father available as he was growing up, was brought up
by his mother and his aunt; the aunt was the warm and
true mother, yet was— and no way to get around it— only
19Los Altos, California, 1959.
28 '
the aunt. It is not strange that the young man in one
way or another had to become his mother's revenge on her
husband, who had rejected both of them. Mr. Schwartz was
a hard-headed businessman; the open rebellion of the son
who rejected his father shows in the young poet's rejec
tion of every value for which his father stood. He
rejected business; he rejected power at the start, and he
rejected his father's picture of reality; delving beneath
all of these, he chose his own weapons, and the picture
one sees of this courageous poet beleaguered, in a world
of money, fighting with only words and ego-assertion, is
not too different from the picture of Marcius.
In the ensuing action, although Marcius rejects the
money and the applause with anger, he accepts, blushing
and moved, the addition to his name— Coriolanus. From
now on he is called Caius Marcius Coriolanus. One recalls
the possibly traumatic effect, and certainly the impor
tance, of the oddness of the name Delmore Schwartz.
Literary evidence of this is shown in the naming of the
20
"I" in the autobiographical poem, Genesis, the name
20
Norfolk, Conn., 1943.
being Hershey Green, and in the verse play, Shenandoah,2*
which is about the naming of an infant boy who was final
ly given the surname "Shenandoah" added to the family
name of "Fish." An additional word on the matter: naming
has, indeed a more than superficial or accidental import
here. From aboriginal rituals of naming to Locke's theory
of meaning, the nature of naming has been connected with
creating— "In the beginning was the word." There is a
possible equation between the singularity of Delmore
Schwartz's name (though all names are singular in another
way) and the fact that a special name was also given to
Caius Marcius.
The identification of author and character becomes
explicit in the last stanza of the first section. As the
music ceases:
Amazed as never before, myself I see
Enter between the curtain's folds, appear
As many titter and some clap hands in glee—
From the box-seat I see myself on show. (p. 33)
This serves as an introduction to the first of the
five prose passages titled "Between the Acts" (p. 37).
The first one has the subtitle, "Pleasure" (p. 39) . Here
21Norfolk, Conn., 1941
the two levels, author and projection of author watching
the play, meld; one knows that one is being spoken to
directly; one is not listening merely to a description of
a play. This is direct address by the author to the
reader and, at the same time, address by the young man in
the audience who has somewhat clownishly stepped up to
the stage and parted the curtains. Thus, the reader
becomes a double audience: the real-world reader and also
the one in the audience listening to the young mem who
has climbed onto the stage. Of course, these are one and
the same reader, but a reinforcing dimension of partici
pation has been added.
In a sense Schwartz uses his person as a persona;
he is both coming forward and retreating, both exhibition-
istic and withdrawn. His persona is candid, flatly honest
while, as author, he so manipulates the tone and the
levels through which it operates that special effects are
achieved. One of these is the tone of the prose passage,
"Pleasure." Here the flat and the ordinarily sententious
becomes sarcastic, ironic, sometimes dramatic and overall,
in an odd way, analytical:
I come, I said, to be useful and to entertain. What
else can one do? Between the acts something must be
done to occupy our minds or we become too aware of
...............'■.... 31
our great emptiness. It is true, we might converse
with one another. But then we would learn again how
little all of us have to say to each other . . .
(p. 34)
The tone, at first, seems to be earnest; only the ante
cedent action, the use of persona makes it suspect.
"What else can one do?" One can do many things, so this
must be understood as a weighty, philosophical shrug.
"Between the acts" carries the implication of "All the
world's a stage" and so refers to more than the action of
Coriolanus, a heavy-handed irony. The flat, calm state
ment, "It is true, we might converse with one another,"
used instead of a shriek because of what was just said
and what is about to be said next, adds a measured qual
ity, a note of enforced patience; it is the sound of a
broken spring. It is a man who recognizes, really knows,
that there is no way out . . . unless it is through the
route of art which allows him this wry mode. It is almost
the tone of a teacher who is teaching down to a serious
but not too bright class, making every statement as clear
as possible, giving the obvious just as much patient
emphasis as the more obscure or profound. But since he
is presumably addressing his peers, the tone also implies
that the comments, true as they are, bespeak a situation
........ • ' ........ 32
hard to tolerate but unchangeable, and also implies that
these comments are not so much his peers' reward, as they
are his punishment. All of this and more is achieved by
the device and the style. And through it are wound the
threads of an age-old response, what Kenneth Burke was
working toward when he named the "comic frame" and
recommended it as the only perspective for intelligence,
and what was also the response of certain wisemen, proph
ets, and rabbis of the past.
In these early prose pieces are some of the themes"
found in Schwartz's work to the very end. He asks, "Why
be desperate, even quietly?" (p. 36), and then complains:
Because one end merely leads to another one, one
activity to another in an inexhaustible endlessness
which is exasperating. (p. 36)
Coriolanus must conquer all to make a mirror that will
give him the necessary image; Schwartz must consume all,
his ego must incorporate all before he can be complete.
That is why the endlessness gags him. He writes here a
wonderful paean to pleasure, defining it first as "the
intrinsicality of being, each thing and each state taken
as final and for itself" (p. 36). After naming all the
pleasures he has known directly or vicariously— "the mys
tery of being called Mrs. for the first time" (p. 37)—
after this long list of incorporated joys, he says, "And
yet I know all this is nothing, nothing consoles one, and
our problem and pain are still before us" (p. 38).
Pleasure is finite; he has said it is not endless; he has
pain which he says is "selfish" (p. 38); it is also indi
vidual. What is he yearning for when he yearns for this
"endlessness" to end? The only way it can end for him is
by total consumption; he must incorporate it, and become
what? He must attain the same circumstance that Corio
lanus must reach. He must, in his unfortunate fashion,
conquer all.
But he feels unsure. Act n begins with, "Absurd
and precarious my presence there" (p. 39), and he is
happy to see the curtain rise and to find himself back in
his seat in the audience. In other words— and this is
only a part of it— he is glad to don the mask of the per
sona, both to reveal art and to hide behind it. He
sketches in the triumphal march, the pride of the aristo
crats to see "their validity displayed in him" (p. 39).
Everyone comes out to see the triumphal march and,
finally, the warrior stands "ashamed to take of their
plaudits so much flushing pleasure" (p. 40). Then
Schwartz again marks the profound relationship between
■ ' 34
mother and son.
Coriolanus descends
Unto that great primordial circumstance
Which holds him yet,
"0 Mother, Mother," kneeling,
Thus he descends to her, "All that I did
I did for you." (p. 40)
This is commented upon by— oddly enough— "the snub
nosed Freud" (p. 40). Freud was certainly not snub-nosed,
but Socrates was. Another mix-up later may be of the
same order. In the third prose section, titled "Choose"
(p. 68), Schwartz tells the story of Coriolanus' journey
away from Rome; he describes Caius Marcius Coriolanus as
follows, "He sees his face, his thick lips, curly hair,
flaring nostrils, broad forehead. His haunted eyes regard
themselves, round lakes full of a kind of sweat" (p. 69).
These may be or may not be the lineaments of Coriolanus,
but they do add up to a description of Schwartz himself,
even to the fact that his "eyes regard themselves"--a way
of characterizing the kind of poem this is. Was this
apparent mistake planned or unconscious? If this were in
a novel, speedily composed, one could accept it as error.
Not so in poetry. But such means Schwartz melds the
influences, the five great ghosts, to place them in the
one mind, that of the author, and then he identifies
........ 35
himself with Coriolanus as the evidence shows above.
Cominius recites the public biography of Coriolanus
and all his exploits, at which the hero flees the scene,
"like a puking girl upset by joy." This is not the first
time Schwartz refers to Coriolanus in disdainful terms as
a female. Does Schwartz think of himself that way? Not
at all or else only partly. Identification with Corio
lanus is one thing, but the use to which the identifica
tion is put is another. Schwartz identifies not to
vindicate himself or his object of identification but to
consume and transcend; his identification is never wholly
compassionate, gentle, or kind; it is predatory. He says
at the end of the first prose passage:
Let us continue to gaze upon it. Let us, I say, make
a few sharp clear definite observations before we
die. Let us judge all things according to the
measure of our hearts (otherwise we cannot live). Let
us require of ourselves the strength and the power to
view ourselves and the heart of man with disgust.
(p. 38)
He does not scruple to tear at himself; why should he
hold back with Coriolanus? This passage contains a credo
that Schwartz followed for the rest of his life; it fol
lowed him, as well, because in it he makes the crucial
statement which sounds like a noble sentiment, but which,
when examined carefully reveals seeds of destruction.
■ ...... ■ ......... 36.
"Let us judge all things according to the measure of our
hearts" seems to say that we should temper all judgments
with true feeling. But, really, it goes further. First,
it says nothing about amelioration; "all things" are to
be judged unequivocally and by what yardstick?— "the
measure of our hearts," neither more nor less. In other
words, let us stand by our own vision of things. But a
result of this insistence is the rejection of "other
minds." But sanity is measured by the degree to which
one accepts the fact of other minds.
Cominius continues his speech until he comes to the
last war, where he reaches the acme of his praise:
Again and again
War after war, the champion in each,
Until before Corioli his war alone,
Sole, single, absolute, per se, alone
(Aseity such as is God's alone) (p. 41)
And do we not, all of us as we grow up, win all our wars
if not in fact, then certainly by rationalization?
The comment by Freud, directly following, is really
concerned with Schwartz; the substance of Schwartz him
self is involved rather than this same substance at one
remove in his persona, although it is Coriolanus about
whom Freud speaks. The revealing statement is:
. . . found solitude most sweet,
Prided himself thereon, and felt contempt
For all not self-contained as he. (p. 42)
And Freud adds,
The past is always present, present as past,
It grasps us like Athena by the hairl (p. 142)
In a short poem called "The Ballet of the Fifth
Year," Schwartz wrote on another occasion about his own
experience:
When I skated, afraid of policemen, five years old,
In the winter sunset, sorrowful and cold,
Hardly attained to thought, but old enough to know
Such grace, so self-contained, was the best escape
to know. (p. 135)
Here again is the concern with origin and its influence.
The second prose interlude is titled "Justice" (p.
46); Schwartz tells an old story which was recounted to
him, he says, as a boy by his father who was in a wheel
chair. It is the well-known story of a man, his son, and
a pony. They were on a journey and although they smarted
with the man walking and the pony carrying the boy, they
were forced by the opinion of each stranger that they met
to change their positions. Finally, when the father
finds himself and his son carrying the pony on the advice
of the last stranger and thus become a laughingstock as
they enter the marketplace, he shoots his son, the pony,
' ' ......... 38
and himself. One can see this, perhaps, as the other
side of the same coin on which is written, "Let us judge
all things according to the measure of our hearts (other
wise we cannot live)" (p. 38).
The interlude ends with a paragraph reminiscent of
the short story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,”
where the poet's mother enters, argues long and brutally
with the father:
. . . while I wept loudly, watching them, weeping
because of the sad end of the story, because they
were denouncing each other and because I had been
slapped for calling my father a liar. (p. 50)
So much for a section headed "Justice”! It becomes in
context an irony, a reminder of the everpresent power of
the past, and a rejection of his father— Schwartz calls
him a liar.
In the beginning of Act III, the explicit admission
appears at last:
His story was my story, he was I
Myself divided in identity (p. 51)
There is violence because of Coriolanus1 refusal to
accommodate the masses; he denounces them with such
insistence that even the aristocrats are uncomfortable,
find his extremism distasteful. Now Socrates makes a
comment which is also extreme and distasteful but which
39
contains the first clear indication of the mode which
eventually became Schwartz's. One must remember that it
is Schwartz who writes this and if the message is dis
tasteful , it is self-disgust that is expressed along with
the self-awareness:
But of all the personal animals
Martius is most extreme, most radical,
Discolors with his teeth each element,
Which gave him being, cooks it, pukes it up,
So by transforming all, himself to be,
Though vomiting be all activity,
Till in the vomit's tint and smell he sees
His unique essence living as disease (p. 54)
It should be pointed out that he writes "cooks it,"
meaning incorporates it, digests it, and "pukes it up."
To feel the self-contempt here in full the reader might
ask himself what he, the reader, is, then, who incorpor
ates it from Schwartz?
The third "Between the Acts" prose interlude is
entitled "There Was a City" (p. 60). It is an allegory
which sets forth in metaphorical but simpler terms the
complex story of the young, creative man born in a
finance-power-utility state. The metaphor comparing the
development of the capitalistic state with the shipbuild
ing city places the action at least one remove from real
ism, makes possible the combination of poetic density
........40 "
and generalization, eras in the city's history rising and
falling in paragraphs and single sentences assigned to
describe major economic shifts; in the synoptic structure
one sees the age-old form of the parable and looks for
the lesson.
The young man assumes the prerogative of evaluating
all kinds of life, rejecting, seemingly without too great
an expense— a lapse in wisdom in the story— the institu
tionally prescribed means of obtaining the rewards of the
sodiety. A "new and unique center of feeling" (p. 64) is
preparing itself in his heart. Because of this creativity,
the future of the city is linked with his future. He
sets out to sea, but, in order to go forward in directions
of his own, he finds it necessary to murder the captain.
The piece ends:
See him! He stands at the prow, observing the glit
tering possibilities of the waters as the ship moves
forward in time. He is in love. I am in love with
him! (p. 65)
It seems clear that this is the apology, an attempt
to show the other side of Coriolanus/Schwartz. Schwartz
has expressed his self-disgust in terms of disgust first
with Coriolanus and then with the human race through
Coriolanus. Here he is expressing his love. It is the
hopeful, creative qualities he loves in himself, in
Coriolanus. Like Coriolanus, the boy in the story is
pure; he insists on his own heart being his measure of
all things. He conforms to none of the acceptable ways.
He rejects, finally, all of the society in which he was
born, and, like Coriolanus, his exile is self-imposed,
and he sails away. But he sails away with a difference.
Coriolanus leaves on his exile with hate; the boy sets
forth with love, with hope, and with a creative urge.
These are the three qualities with which Schwartz faced
his own life: love, hope, and the ability of an artist.
This is his picture of himself— the two combined, the boy
at the prow of the ship and Coriolanus. The difference
between the two is not too great; one recalls that the
boy, with all his love and hope, starting a voyage to new
places, a new life, surrounded by the poetry of Schwartz's
allegorical prose— in this context, finds "it necessary
for him to murder the captain of the ship" in order to
set his own course. Again, like Coriolanus, it must be
his trip alone; is he not asserting the necessary sover
eignty of the artist whose early arrogance acts as a
protection during his green period? Though the murder is
metaphorical, it is still murder. It is personal emphasis
42
on the most extreme act of rejection possible. It is
without doubt an expression of the intense insistence on
purity, on the extreme, therefore, which is to be found
in the character of Coriolanus as well. This is also a
signification of rage as well as an assertion of self
hood. After all, the Captain was probably such a one as
the boy himself, sailing for new territories— the younger
poet and the older poet. In a poem called "The Long
22
Home," John Berryman treated the subject; about the
master who is dying he writes: "He is going where I come/
Barefoot soul fringed with rime" (p. 94). There was rage
in the boy on the boat; this could bring about distrust
and suspicion later on, because rage in the absence of
real causes invariably attempts to create artificial ones.
There is considerable distance between Berryman's gentle
recognition of his own muse, and Schwartz/Coriolanus'
raging insistence on his.
Act IV starts by Schwartz referring to Coriolanus as
"my twin" (p. 66). Coriolanus leaves the city, assuring
his mother that his letters will be regular, but he is
not despairing; he feels himself strong, alone, and
22
The Dispossessed (New York, 1948), p. 94.
43
"perfect once again" (p. 67). His feeling is extended
and justified by the prose interlude immediately follow
ing, which is titled "Choose" (p. 68). Choice involves
freedom and it is appropriate that the author add his
comment on the subject of free-will at the juncture where
the boy from the ship-building city sets sail on his
journey, and where Marcius Coriolanus starts alone on his
exile from Rome. Schwartz begins:
No introduction, no idle remarks, I am tired as you
of too much discussion and come now merely to bring
the story forward. (p. 68)
This contains overtones from Shakespeare and reminds one
that Schwartz says, in another poem: "We are Shakespearean,
we are strangers," and "0 I am sad when I see dogs or
children!/ For they are strangers, they are Shakespear
ean" (p. 96). The authors who score most heavily with
Schwartz are the great ones— Shakespeare, Goethe, and,
among moderns, Rilke and Joyce. In his last book, among
his latest poems, is one addressed to Shakespeare and
titled "Gold Morning, Sweet Prince.There is no doubt
that in "Coriolanus" one can hear many Shakespearean
overtones— not strange, also, since he is treating a
^ summer Knowledge (New York, 1959), p. 173.
Shakespearean play. "Merely to bring the story forward"
(p. 68) is one of these. It is appropriate also that
this overtone start the interlude of Coriolanus' wander
ing when he is a stranger among strange peoples, moving
finally to the very opposite pole of his home— his enemy,
the ultimate stranger. Note, too, that the motion from
one pole to the other is tied irretrievably to rejection
between the poles, the rejection of the mores of the
ship-building city by the boy, Coriolanus1 rejection of
the Roman populace and Schwartz's rejection of American
materialism.
At the point of insistence on polar choice, Corio
lanus runs into trouble. Choice involves freedom of will
and this involves morality. Coriolanus never seems to
examine the morality of his either/or choices. The lit
tle story places this responsibility on him. Coriolanus
wanders in the wilderness and there come to the reader's
mind other wanderings in the wilderness, all of them
yielding the same soul-searching, the same spiritual
tribulations— the wanderings of Moses and his flock, the
loneliness of St. Augustine, the weary and alone Moham
med; it seems that what Schwartz calls the "Shakespear
ean," that is, strangers and wilderness, forms an objec
45
tive correlative for the sense of inner strangeness, for
the meeting of oneself in truth for the first time, for
the coming to terms with this stranger. Coriolanus mov
ing angrily and then despairingly through the wilderness
comes at last to a lake; he reaches, in the standard
symbolic form, the possibility of spiritual sustenance.
He is desolate. Even his mother is against him, "even
his sleep betraying him" (p. 69). He has "attained to
the emptiness for which he has striven" (p. 69); this is
an early stage on a spiritual pilgrimage a la Eliot and
St. John of the Cross. On the journey Eliot describes
one empties oneself of worldly things, one neither hopes
nor despairs, one waits in a vacuum. Coriolanus, by
immense rejection, by insistence on selfhood alone but a
selfhood pure and immature, moves into this circumstance
as a novitiate manque. He kneels by the lake, looks into
it and regards himself. The face described with the
reflected sky as the backdrop or "hat" (p. 69) is
Schwartz's face: '
It is the moment of vision and decision. Staring
upon that face which is his own, he sees his own
life, and the lives rejected and the choices chosen,
and the immediacy of anger and pleasure and the
abstracted stare of memory, and the strangeness, to
himself, of his own face, the most peculiar of flow
ers. (p. 69)
......... ' .......' .......46
As he gazes into the lake, his own face is replaced
by that of his mother, which blooms and grows into an
enormous image. She tells him that he is nothing apart
from her; he can not reject her. His lips, the shape of
his head, his "strength, system, urge, habit, complexion,
and dress" (p. 70) will be with him wherever he goes and
these come from her. She speaks two paragraphs, the
first ends:
The word of your tongue is mine. Your effort to
depart from me is your pain, your evil. I am your
mother or Rome. I am Volumnia or Rome. (p. 70)
And then, in the last paragraph, she hands him his
strategy for living. She is his, she tells him, but he
is his own. "Lips, face, hair, look, your own, your
property. This is your freedom" (p. 70). His words are
his own, though he has taken them from her. She ends her
statement with an emphasis on his irreducible individual
ity, assuring him of his freedom of will:
Nothing compels you, no imperative dictates to you,
the actuality of your choice is what it is for you,
your individuality grasps the uniqueness of each
moment. This surpasses me. This is your freedom.
Choose! (p. 70)
Here, again, is the recommended strategy— incorporation.
He is to incorporate his mother in order to preserve his
own selfhood. This is the first step in a long line of
consumption. She promises him that once this is accom
plished, he is no longer hers, she is his and he is
himself, alone again, and can make his choice. But this
is only symbol and gesture; long before both Coriolanus
and Schwartz had already made the choice which was both
irresistable and irremediable.
Part III, entitled "A Goodly House, the Feast Smells
Well" (p. 71) repeats the decision-circumstance previewed
in the prose interlude. Stressing the necessity for a
clean-cut choice between opposites, Schwartz shows the
curtain rising on a night in which "All's indeterminate
except the moon" (p. 71). He shows Marcius Coriolanus in
white, faced by two enormous signs painted phosphores
cent, one marked "To Antium" (p. 71) and the other "To
Rome" (p. 71). The poet points out that the signs are
unnatural: "Night over all/ Except the rounding moon
which dreams of snow/ Unnatural as both signs" (p. 71).
In size and color they are unnatural out in the waste;
next to each other. But, more central to the theme, the
presentation of two extremes to choose from— no possibil
ity of compromise— is also unnatural, ^lost men find it
necessary, helpful, part of maturity to give a little and
take a little. But the protagonists of tragedy seldom
48
do; they are the ones who invariably measure all things
by their own hearts.
This is echoed in the comments of Aristotle, Freud,
and Beethoven. Aristotle calls this the "peripety," the
turning point and the essence of his philosophy when
Coriolanus has made the choice: ". . .he now has done/
All that a man can do, committed his will/ Once and for
all, purchased his only fate" (p. 72). Freud says that
"Every act is a boomerang," (p. 73) and Beethoven, who is
now vocal says, "This man eats his heart" (p. 72). The
ritual of comment serves the purpose here of adding to
the crucial character of the choice-making. It is true
that realization of all the possibilities ensuing from
the making of a choice might paralyze one; it is also
true that few do take their lives into their hands, and
still fewer do so with significant results. Over and
over again, Schwartz refers to Coriolanus as "the abso
lute" and in this section, moving back to a description
of Rome, he writes: "Rome fattens, rid of its poor abso
lute" (p. 75). The first two words imply-complacence,
wickedness and corruption which, of course, is the one
pole while the other is the purity of the absolute.
Coriolanus, despite damages, is always a man; therefore,
49
so much in the play and in the poem is heroic and noble.
That it is a nobility unmodified, makes it an absolute;
since it is unblessed by humility, some might say, it
must also be monstrous. In his first published short
story Schwartz refers to the monstrous characters of his
father's two children.
The end of the section marks the trepidation of Rome
when the news breaks that the enemy is coming with Corio
lanus at the head. The significant lines here, however,
tell how, regardless of his vows to show humility,
Coriolanus can not stop himself from undermining Aufidius.
"He gnaws Aufidius with every tooth" (p. 76). This he
can not help, though he has sworn to "move with modesty
and loyalty" (p. 76):
But the true
Is irreducible. The individual is uncontrollable.
To him
To him, the soldiers draw, forget Aufidius. (p. 76)
And the prediction is made that in this fault lies
Coriolanus* ultimate downfall.
The existential notion of the irreducibility of the
individual is the subject of the last prose interlude,
which is titled "He is a Person" (p. 77). The fact of
uniqueness seems somehow for Schwartz an excuse for being
50
"absolute." It is also proof of the ability to choose:
His uniqueness is obvious though he resembles other
members of his family. His voice has a certain
intonation which has never been heard from another
man . . . he is an original. (p. 78)
Then follows a recapitulation of the theme of origin.
This identity question, "Who is he?" (p. 78), is central.
He is seen as the product of his past which is part of
him but invisible. And then, because of his uniqueness,
he in turn creates the future, "Remark the original face
which is unrecognizable, never before having been" (p.
79). To this Schwartz adds these lines written about
Coriolanus, and so reminiscent in tone and idea of the
third prose interlude— the lines written about the young
boy leaving the city and sailing away at the prow of the
ship (p. 65).
His freedom creates the future. He is the mystery
irreducible. His freedom is his mystery. With
his freedom he does it, his unknown creative act
. . . O my beauty! See him sharply and exactly.
Coriolanus, Coriolanus, the individual, (p. 79)
Act V follows on the same theme and is entitled
"As if a Man were Author of Himself" (p. 80). First,
Cominius visits Coriolanus to beg that he spare Rome;
then Menenius comes to beg. Both are denied in front of
Aufidius. At last Volumnia, his mother, and his wife and
51
child enter. The great scene in which he finally gives
in to his mother is described. Socrates, in ecstatic
tones bears witness to the truth that Coriolanus is the
future for his family and Rome:
All, all depends on him, on his sole heart,
He is contingency, it is his will.
He is the future of time, it is his choice. (p. 84)
In the hysteria of the moment, all the ghosts clam
oring, and Coriolanus and his mother facing each other,
Schwartz, the author, intervenes, and asks fearfully who
the silent ghost is, '"Who is that silent one, I asked
in fear/ Who is that ghost who has not said one word?'"
(p. 86), and hears the reply:
He is the one who saw what you did not!
He is the one who heard what you did not,
He is the one you do not know, my dear. (p. 88)
The author, then, is not omniscient. This is what the
lines mean, but more than this is implied. What he does
not know is, so to speak, dead to him. He is dead to all
experience which is not his or, put another way, every
thing that occurs which he does not experience might just
as well never occur or exist as far as his apprehension
of life is concerned. It need never have been; it need
never be. Thus, one may be said to be largely dead in
52
the first place; one is merely a pinpoint of awareness in
the midst of a cosmos of death. This peculiar point of
viewr this emphasis on the partial, on death, runs through
Coriolanus and much of Schwartz's other work. Death is
considered, not surprisingly, over and over again by this
poet, but it is always the personal death, the personal
limitation in partiality where what is left of the per
son— after the areas already determined by progenitors
who have shaped the plastic and fixed the environment—
is only an impermanent victim of further contingency.
Coriolanus leads his family safely out, returns to
face his death at the hands of Aufidius and his soldiers.
Schwartz writes, "And thus the exhausted hero is struck
down" (p. 88). As the curtain falls, this is repeated
exactly by Aristotle, who adds, "Man's will is free/ This
man becomes the man he chose to be" (p. 88).
There is no doubt that Coriolanus is a significant
and moving document. That it is a successful poem is
doubtful; there are too many formal difficulties, for one
thing. Though the prose interludes fit thematically into
the work, they break into the rhythm of the poetic sec
tions. The device of the great ghosts— projecting the
actual presence of great men of the past together with
their comments into the action of the poem— seems a fail
ure on every count. It slows the action, and worse, the
comments add little to the intellectual content. The
insights, expressed often awkwardly by the ghosts, are
really contained in a subtler and far more effective form
in the rest of the poetry. Schwartz gives himself better
Comments than he gives the spectator ghosts. One would
suppose that their ironic comment could be doubly sharp
given the situation— here are the influences on the
author watching, as an objective play, his inner state
for which they are partially responsible! One might also
expect that the differences in their comments would high
light their various contributions to the intellectual
life of the poet. This is not the case. It is possible
that Schwartz was in conflict about using this device but
that the ritualistic need he felt for compulsively and
publically counting his intellectual beads, for calling
these great ghosts out of their sleep to accept their
share of responsibility for the action, was, in the end,
too great. What is presented, therefore, is a poem with
all the blueprints and the scaffolding hanging on the
outside.
.......54
One should note, also, that both the prose sections
and the poetry sections are characterized by a frantic
juxtaposition of concretes and abstractions. In both
sections, general statements pile up and in their hearts,
throbbing with substantiality, the concretes are scat-
tered, apparently arbitrarily. To be blunt (and brave,
for words like this are seldom used these days) there is
a breach of decorum. Although one must read large parts
of this material to come to any conclusion such as this,
an example or two may help to show the kind of rhetoric
referred to here, though not the degree or quantity.
Rome fattens, rid of its poor absolute. (p. 75)
Or
In the Shakespearean night, the souls of the poor
fool and the brave hero . . . shiver and huddle
in a nakedness . . . possessing hair, eyes, hands,
feet, arms, belly, genitals. (p. 77)
Or
The belly-button bleeds! The hero dies!
Thus will he pay the dialectical price. (p. 67)
It must be admitted, however, that a tension is created
by this style, a feeling of constant motion; one is never
permitted to relax into the expectation of either a
smoother series of abstract statements or of rich, con
crete materials. Put another way, one can say that both
55
concretes and abstractions are necessary in a work, but
that they are seldom so grossly joined.
Liking it is, of course, a matter of taste. There
are good reasons to buttress those who feel that, since
the piece is short, the condensed plot of Shakespeare's
play (the action unrelieved by full portrayal of charac
ter) seems unmitigated violence and, therefore, the
rephrasing bombastic. In such a context, the prose inter
ludes can be taken to be self-indulgent.
One is inclined, on occasion, to agree with some of
this but this is a narrative, philosophical poem, pos
sibly the only one of its kind in the twentieth century.
Its virtue lies in the poetry and in the honesty; the
choice of Coriolanus as the persona is brilliant.
Schwartz is never evasive here; in this work he faces
himself in at least three mirrors, the ghosts, the pro
jected image of himself watching the play and partly par
ticipating as when he comes forward to present the prose
pieces, and the action of the play within the poem, the
destiny of Coriolanus so seriously identified with that
of the poet himself.
"The Repetitive Heart"
Of the thirty-five poems in In Dreams Begin Respon
sibilities, eleven are in a separate section called "The
Repetitive Heart." The subtitle, "Eleven Poems in Imita
tion on the Fugue Form," raises many questions as to the
degree of resemblance between the grouping and the "Fugue
Form." These questions are not easy to answer, in part
because the fugue is not a schematic form; it is texture.
In referring to it as a form, Schwartz reveals a certain
naivet&, the degree of which is in doubt, and this
forces the reader to eliminate the poet's declared inten
tion as a sound guide to the details of comparison between
this set of poems and the fugue. One can only bear in
mind the outstanding characteristics of a fugue while
giving the poetry a reading.
A fugue is composed of a specified number of "voices"
or "parts." The words "voices" and "parts" will be used
here to refer to the succession in time of articulated
sections of the fugue. More significant, a fugue is
monothematic, states a single subject. In the course of
the fugal exposition, there is a cumulative beginning,
the first part or voice followed by the second, etc.,
57
until all the voices enter; thus, the theme or subject,
as the fugal melody is called, is stated. After the
first exposition, the rest is an unpredictable succession
of episodes and partial or full expositions.
There are also a number of special devices which may
be used; the pattern of the subject may be either re
versed or inverted in subsequent statements; the subjec-b
may enter, repeated in the second voice before the first
is finished (called stretto); the subject may— in later
versions in the fugue— be stated slowly (grandeur), or
more rapidly (excitement); finally, there may be a change
of mode from major to minor or vice versa; keeping the
identity of the subject, but darkening or brightening the
mood.
One fact is apparent; in the case of Schwartz's
poems, though they contain metrical variation, it is not
of main significance in the fugal comparison; the impor
tant contrapuntal play and the repetition in the poems is
a matter of theme or idea, and this, I suggest, is to be
likened to the "subject" of the fugue.
The first of the eleven poems, then, makes the fugal
statement which presumably will be the subject repeated
by the different voices. Schwartz begins, "All of us
always turning away for solace/ Prom the lonely room
where the self must be honest" (p. 91). He lists some
typical distractions, all based on playing ball in one
way or another (Schwartz was a fervent follower of base
ball) . He mentions billiards, baseball, and football.
He writes that this, indeed, is solace, the "Bounding,
evasive, caught and uncaught, fumbled ..." And then
he adds that one follows the bouncing ball, "Fingering
closely your breast on the left side." This reminds one
of the phrase, "self-squeezing heart" from"Coriolanus"
(p. 171), and the ending of "Dr. Gergen's Belief" (p. 88)
— "Man destroys his own heart," because at the end of
this brief poem he again refers to the ball, "The bounc
ing ball you turned from for solace" (p. 91). The full
subject of the total fugue, then, seems to be that there
is no solace either in the bouncing ball— the concrete
distractions— or in solitude— the honest self-facing
itself. And this is the case only if Schwartz meant the
"fugue form" to apply overall to the eleven poems, not to
each in particular.
Thus, the second poem seems to answer the demand for
solace, even though offering neither distraction nor
honesty. Here he addresses, most gently, "Ruth of sweet
59
wind," and asks her to be his solidity, stability, and
fidelity:
Will you perhaps consent to be
Now that a little while is still
(Ruth of sweet wind) now that a little while
My mind's continuing and unreleasing wind
Touches this single of your flowers, this one only,
Will you perhaps consent to be
My many-branched, small and dearest tree? (p. 92)
He sees himself as the wind which is "wild and restless,
tired and asleep." He sees her as his small tree, for
ever rooted. This is a fond masculine idea of the rela
tionship— she immobile, eternally faithful— and he con
tinuously mobile, shifting with impulse, completely free.
Attendant on such a notion there is always excessive
tenderness and gentleness for the exploited object; this
accounts for the ecstatic sweetness of the tone.
My dear, most dear, so-many-branched tree
My mind's continuing and unreleasing wind
Touches this single of your flowers, faith in me,
Wide as the— sky!— accepting as the (air)!
Consent, consent, consent to be
My many-branched, small and dearest tree. (p. 92)
What is also involved is the great thankfulness the poet
can feel— the poet in whom the burden of distrust becomes
more unendurable yearly— in being allowed to place his
trust. But, even so, she must be his "smallest" tree.
She must be diminutive and firmly rooted before she can
60
become even the slightest solace.
The third poem repeats the different kinds of
solace, while the overtones of the first are still echo
ing. Another tune is added to the subject; "All clowns
are masked and all personae/ Flow from choices" (p. 93).
Here the poet loses some of the poetry to the habit of
philosophizing. Despite Schwartz's ability to handle
ideas and his high-pressure interest in them, they seldom
diminish the poetry. They may often stand out, be unab
sorbed by the poetic line, extraneous, in a sense, to the
style, but here they do not block the poetry in a large
way. In this case, the conjecture about free will does
just that. He continues:
And yet not so! For all are circumstances,
Given, like a tendency
To colds or like blonde hair and wealth,
Or war and peace or gifts for mathematics,
Fall from the sky, rise from the ground, stick to us
In time, surround us: Socrates is mortal. (p. 93)
And so, in some way, we are free in a small scope to make
choices but in a large way they are determined for us by
a chain of causes or by what we call contingency. Inter
esting comment that falls out of the rhythm and stumbles
past the poetry into prose! The rest of the poem does
not. Socrates is chosen because he is the great
61
questioner; he, too, is mortal, which means, in this
context, that his freedom likewise is curtailed— . .
he who chooses, chooses what is given." The final com
ment, a filigree around the subject, states that "He who
chooses is ignorant of Choice"; this is a reference to the
common man of action who makes what he believes are
choices, and who must, in order to act decisively, be
ignorant of the paralyzing fact that he can only choose
"what is given." It is apparent that this is the average
man of action because he is not choosing anything except
love, which means children. It is children who are the
choice and the artist does not choose children: Shaw's
Man and Superman is a reminder of this. This section of
the "fugue" ends: "So full of choices! So full of
children!/ And the past is immortal, the future inex
haustible!" (p. 93). The exclamation points reveal an
irony because the promise of immortality through children
is imperfect, to put it at its best, and with or without
children the feeling that the future is inexhaustible is
pure delusion. The irony takes the place, at this point,
of the subject of "no solace," and so the subject, though
advanced through "filigree" is restated in this poem. On
the thematic level, the new point made— that contingency
62
rules, that those who think they choose, choose blindly,
"And all our choices grasp in Blind Man's Buff" (p. 93)—
may be likened to a part of the arbitrarily short or long
section of the fugue following the statement of the
subject and adding to it.
Number four sees a metrical speeding up; the poem
is written in iambic tetrameter in most cases with an
additional syllable to move it faster. The repetition of
certain lines such as "Time is the fire in which we burn"
adds to his message of the wildness and momentum of the
conflagration of living. This is clearly the statement
of the subject again; that this is speeded up for excite
ment is typical of the fugue. The subject, "distracted
from distraction by distraction,"24 is given to his com
ment on the "pauper and rentier,/ The screaming children,
the motor car," when he adds "Fugitive about us, running
away." They are, in terms of the original statement,
turning to the bouncing ball for solace, then from the
bouncing ball for solace. Again the note of detexmina-
tionism is sounded:
24
T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-
1950, from the poem, "Burnt Norton," Part III in the
"Four Quartets" (New York: 1962).
63
(. . . that time is the fire in which we burn.)
(This is the school in which we learn . . .)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again (p. 94)
The poem ends with the justly familiar characterization
of the intimate experience of flux:
The great globe reels in the solar fire
Spinning the trivial and unique away
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn. (p. 95)
A further investigation in the nature of the self—
philosophic, in a sense— continues the fugal texture.
This is an addendum to the no-solace theme but by impli
cation only. What is revealed in this, the fifth poem,
is the apparently contradictory nature of man. The ac
ceptance of the problem of generals and particulars is
concretized in the opening lines:
Dogs are Shakespearean, children are strangers
Let Freud and Wordsworth discuss the child,
Angels and Platonists shall judge the dog . . . (p. 96)
In this statement the dogs are generals and are to be
recognized by ideals (angels) and idealists (Platonists)
while the children are particulars, individual psyches,
recognized by Freud (sex, nature) and Wordsworth (romantic
trust). The use of "Shakespearean" in this case seems to
be carried by the connotation of "types" since some of
his greatest characters are considered atypical. The
first stanza ends with a line combining both children and
dogs in the use of "they"— for they are strangers, they
are "Shakespearean." This is possible since the preced
ing lines show that both have sensibility— the girl who
understood the wind and rain" and the dog "who moaned,
hearing the violins in concert."
An additional connotation of "Shakespearean" is the
remainder of the Shakespearean cosmos which is amenable
to magic, a place where abstract evil exists, unpredict
able events as well as predictable ones, a dark and wild
dome of the ineffable over the heads of man. Schwartz's
"Shakespearean" blank verse questions the insights of
Freud and Wordsworth, suggests they are limited:
And you, too, Wordsworth, are children truly
Clouded with glory, learned in dark nature?
The dog in humble inquiry along the ground,
The child who credits dreams and fears the dark,
Know more and less than you; they know full well
Nor dream nor childhood answers questions well:
You too are strangers, children are Shakespearean.
(p. 96)
It must also be clear that, allies on the one hand, Freud
and Wordsworth are also poles apart in the sense that the
65
basis for Freud's thought is concrete, the family con
stellation; Wordsworth's feeling about children contains
something mystical if not metaphysical. So, a double
layer of seeming opposites— the generals and the particu
lars and within the particular the secular and the mys
tical— meld in the last line of the stanza that begins,
"You too are strangers." Schwartz is working toward the
last stanza where he can make this statement include
everyone and, in fact, everything. It begins, "Regard
the child, regard the animal," and it ends in a final and
third connotation from the word "Shakespearean"— the
implication of "personae" as used in the third poem, that
"all the world's a stage":
And we are howling out our souls
In beating syllables before the curtain:
We are Shakespearean, we are strangers, (p. 96)
Thus, in living, the poles of attempted understanding
meet. But classification— generals and particulars—
fails in the face of this melding into the "inexhaustible
future," mortal and unknown. In the end, Schwartz is,
of course, speaking of himself and identifying with the
audience.
This brings him to a consideration, in the next
poem, number six, of the liabilities of his place in the
audience, among people. The subject of the fugue has
been extended in the discussion of the limitation, as a
solace, of intellectual and poetic enterprise in the
prior poem; it is further embroidered upon by the discus
sion in number six of the hellishly ingenious combination
in man of twin needs which appear to cancel each other
out— our need for each other and our need to betray each
other, even dearest friends by their friends. There is
no doubt that Schwartz's own hostility expressed itself
in the distrust exhibited in the opening lines:
Do they whisper behind my back? Do they speak
Of my clumsiness? Do they laugh at me,
Mimicking my gestures, retailing my shame? (p. 97)
The stanza continues, bitterly presenting the experience
of suspicion, denunciation, and withdrawal, "Nor will I
once again . . ./ Recognize their faces, take their
hands.1 1 In the long second stanza, characteristically
revealing himself and his own faults, he admits that he,
too, betrays his friends. "For wit's sake, to amuse,
because their being weighed/ Too grossly for a time, to
be superior ..." He is, he writes, betraying the old
intimacy for the new momentary intimacy. What solace,
then, is friendship? "What an unheard-of thing it is,
in fine,/ To love another and equally be loved!" (p. 97).
67
Schwartz emphasizes the burden of both sadness and joy.
This last stanza dissolves into distracted prose:
. . . I need
My face unshamed, I need my wit, I cannot
Denounce them once for all, they cannot
Turn away. We know our clumsiness,
Our weakness, our necessities, we cannot
Forget our pride, our faces, our common love. (p. 98)
And here the form of the fugal filigree entangles, is
almost lost in the composer's despair. At this ending,
the poem drops— but not quite— into what, as a general
error, has been somewhat pontifically referred to in the
field of criticism as "the fallacy of imitative form."
In poem seven the poet turns to his feelings for
solace; after all, the heart perceives in its own way.
This is hopeless; in the first line Schwartz writes, "I
am to my own heart merely a serf." He calls this state
in which the heart assumes control "incredible assump
tion," making several suitable puns. But the situation
is nothing to pun about:
I climb the sides of buildings just to get
Merely a gob of gum, all that is left
Of its infatuation of last year.
Being the servant of incredible assumption.
Being to my own heart merely a serf. (p. 99)
In other words, by any other criterion, his activities
are all out of proportion so far as the profit that is to
be gained when the heart rules; nothing is less tasteful,
useful, desirable than a gob of gum which one will rechew
like a cud, but he is made to climb the side of a build
ing to get it. The incongruity of his action reveals the
justness of his self-depreciation. But even if he recovers
a bit of the old feeling "... one is sick of chewing
gum all day"; his reaction is anger, and sleep is the only
means of dissipating it. Not always the case, however.
Often "sleep is too crowded . . . full of chores impos
sible and heavy 1 1 (p. 99) . Among these chores is the
carrying of his father's carriage on his back— another
reminder of origins and the determining power of one's
forebears; also, this recalls the parable in the fourth
prose interlude of "Coriolanus." When sleep does not
palliate, the poet wakes with his anger renewed, and
finds himself once more on the misery-go-round of:
The unfed hope, the unfed animal,
Being the servant of incredible assumption,
Being to my own heart merely a serf. (p. 99)
The statement is the same statement made at the beginning
of the poem— the subject of the fugue merely restated in
another voice or part and with, perhaps, the curligue of
a bit of extra filigree as well. It is only another
substantial statement that we move to the bouncing ball
for distraction and from it for distraction. One might
say that Schopenhauer is the philosophic grandfather of
this fugue, but, in a book replete with culture heroes,
he is never named. There is frequently, in all of us,
an unwillingness to betray to public knowledge the earli
est and closest, usually familial, influences. One can
not escape realizing that the great show of disclosure
put on by the exhibitionist has its function of obfusca
tion; that which is closest is inevitably hidden, held in
reserve, the entire activity of surface frankness being
counted on to protect it. This is more often than not
the gambit of Schwartz; much is revealed by it; but one
need not lose sight of the full function of the revela
tion.
Here in poem seven it is becoming clear that "action
is suffering, and suffering action” for Schwartz, and,
since Eliot was such a powerful influence, the point is
appropriately introduced. From this situation there is
no recourse unless it is death. But Schwartz continues
to consider the possibilities of solace. The fugal state
ment will be reiterated.
Now comes the cry for help, whatever help can be got
from Schwartz's only reservoir— the cultural past,
"Abraham and Orpheus be with me now": he has admitted his
need for love as well as his need of betraying it. Now
in poem eight he cries out because even when his love is
given, it is given to the evanescent, the ephemeral. Of
both Abraham and Orpheus the very same strange condition,
strange requirement, was made in the name of love, as—
in the sense of Schwartz's meaning in both poems— is
required of us all. Each had to betray his love to
death; and, in the name of love, to sustain this sacri
fice. Schwartz is no different, nor is anyone else who
cares. It is worse, even, than this, for we do not wait
for the death of the beloved; instead, quite often, "Love
exhausts itself and time goes round and round"; the love,
itself, fades with time, and disappears, which is perhaps
the saddest thing of all. Thus, love has a shadow as
have all substantial things; it is the shadow of death—
really a lovely figure. And in this shadow Orpheus
drowns, and so must we all. The poem ends, "I asked your
learned presence, care and fear,/ Abraham and Orpheus, be
near, be near" (p. 100). And, of course, what solace
are these great myths of the past? They, too, drowned
"in the shadow all love always bears."
The magnifying glass Schwartz has been using is also
71
a burning glass, and the reader has gained through this
poet's terrifying honesty, but he has been scorched as
well. The relentless dialectic continues with the ninth
poem. In the search for solace, one has been driven away
from reliance on ordinary distraction— the bouncing ball—
on sweet stability— the many-branched tree which proves
to be, ultimately, "the very rack and crucifix ... of
winter's wild . . . ice-caressing wind"— on freedom of
choice— Blind man's Bluff— on the security of the present—
"Time is the fire in which we burn" (p. 95)— on the abil
ity to understand our contradictory selves— generals and
particulars, classification fails— on friendship— Do they
whisper behind my back?— on freedom of feeling— "I am to
my own heart merely a serf" (p. 99)— on love of mortal
things which dies even before natural death— "Love love
exhausts and time goes round and round" (p. 100) . Next
one looks to the adequacy of solace through the physical
self in its life.
Poem number nine, much anthologized, gives con
sideration to this problem. The theme is in the quota
tion from Whitehead that precedes it— "'the withness of
the body,'" but this is still an embroidering around the
original fugal statement involving the lack of solace.
72
Some might write about the joys of the body; in fact, in
one of the interludes in "Coriolanus" Schwartz does men
tion the joys of the athlete but this poem goes deeper.
Even the athlete is subject to the "withness of the body."
Ecstasy-seekers may underline the essence of the skier's
joy in flight, but the honest man with the magnifying
glass calls to mind the early clumsiness, the tight boot
strap, the burn of cold in the nostril, the tremendous
differential between image or ideal of the athlete and
the actual gross accomplishment. This is what Schwartz
does in the poem about his body, "The heavy bear who goes
with me" (p. 101). Only the speed of imagination makes
the body clumsy by comparison; when the poet wishes a
gentleness or a refined nuance, a delicate touch, he can
rely on the "heavy bear" to coarsen the moment:
Stretches to embrace the very dear
With whom I would walk without him near.
Touches her grossly . . .
Dragging me with him in his mouthing care
Amid the hundred million of his kind,
The scrimmage of appetite everywhere, (p. 101)
This vision is possible only because of the mind-body
separation allowed for the sake of the poem, and because
of respect for the ability the poet has for self-con
sciousness to an extreme. Part of the poet is assessing
another part. The dichotomy is not meant as a piece of
metaphysics, only a sharp observation. What comes out of
it is that the body fits us like an ill-used shoe— clumsy,
betraying, belying, distorting. Its needs are crude but
powerful; the implication is that it can not be relied
upon for solace. And so the poet weights the matter;
there are no doubts that this poem constitutes a firm,
authentic portrayal. It is possible, however, to point
out that if the body is forever with us with its liabili
ties, it has as its assets that— more often than not with
most human beings— constitute profound consolation no
matter how simple and brainless they appear. In its
mildest form, for instance, the stroking need when grati
fied can be a solace. Thus, if this were the point of
the poem, one could take the weighting as a serious fault
in the portrayal. But the real point is simply the fact
of the body in the world. The body is there, and it is
there first just as art is there before criticism. And
the persistence alone is unending discomfort but this is
a persistence below the level of sex or food satisfac
tions: "Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness/ The
secret life of belly and bone" (p. 101). It should also
be noted that this includes the clown motif which recurs
74
often in Schwartz's poetry— usually supplied by one who
distrusts strongly, feels especially vulnerable.
Schwartz involved himself in a complex circuit of reac
tions that were meant to gain control and approbation; if
he exaggerated his defect, admitted his clown-self, the
admission put him on a level transcending the fault and
thus he was automatically exonerated. It is not an uncom
mon way of exploiting a liability. The plus response is
the promise first, then the performance of candidness.
It could be labeled the Ecce Homo motif and is used for
all it is worth in this well-known poem and also quite
frequently in the rest of his work. This is not to say
that truth is bypassed; on the contrary, much is revealed
that is often elsewhere suppressed, but it is a mode
based on selectivity and magnification. Behind it is a
mask of irony and behind that the author moves in impreg
nable and perfect control. Looked at this way, and if
one wished to take a "way out" stand, he might call the
point of view "somewhere a lie," the result of a confused
notion of truth, in somewhat the same fashion that the
English philosopher takes his stand with "ordinary lan
guage" as against the confusions of sophisticated semanti-
cists and traditional idealists.
In the tenth poem of the series, the reader is back
to the unique self which combines— in poem five— both
generals and particulars. In poem five, one was already
introduced to the dog which was Shakespearean and to the
children who are strangers. The tenth poem begins, "A
dog named Ego ..." which is also referred to, some
lines further, as "the stranger, unknown." Recourse for
solace is now being made to the complete ego which, in
some way beyond us all, combines the poles of classifica
tion, is both concrete and abstract, unique, specific,
particular and yet general, and unfree: "Not free, no
liberty, rock that you carry,/ So spoke ego in his cracked
and harsh voice" (p. 103). Ego's voice is cracked and
harsh not only because he is a dog— and there are conno
tations here!— but also because in the clinical sense he
lacks the other portions of the psyche, the id which was
covered in poem nine, and certain kinds of feeling which
were reviewed in poem five. And Ego, the dominator,
buttressed with consciousness and reason, says.
Mine is the kingdom,
Dynasty's bone; you will not be free,
Go, choose, run, you will not be alone, (p. 103)
Commensurate with his doghood is the "bone," but, pre
ceded by "dynasty's," this has all the implication of
76
Schwartz's concern with origins and ancestry as power
fully determining factors in the destruction of freedom
of will. Also, the dog is surrounded by snowflakes:
"Come, come, come," sang the whirling snowflakes,
Evading the dog who barked at their smallness
Falling from some place half-believed and
unknown. (p. 103)
From heaven? From an origin beyond the capacity of ego
alone to discover, known only by faith which is beyond
ego? Led by the dog, Ego, who chases the snowflakes, the
poet goes:
. . . further and father away,
While night collapsed amid the falling,
And left me no recourse far from my home,
And left me no recourse far from my home. (p. 103)
Far from the possibility of solace through Ego, the poet
instead experiences a very dangerous circumstance; he is
lost, far from his home. What causes this in the terms
of the poem is given in this line: "While Ego barked at
them, swallowed their touch." This is a dire prediction
for Schwartz, as hindsight now proves. Ego seeks to en
large by incorporation; he would devour all the beautiful
but cold experiences that fall unpredictably along his
way. This is the way of Ego and if he is allowed to
lead, the total human being can become lost with ". . .no
recourse" far from his home. Obviously there is no
solace in the forward drive of Ego; his method is incor
poration and what he tries to incorporate is evanescent,
liquifies, and disappears, leaving him at a loss. So far
as the literary artist is concerned, this mode of ego-
leadership will not do either; only the Eliotic solution
of humility before tradition can save, and, perhaps
Schwartz was too honest in the context of his origin or
too stiff-backed to accept it.
The final poem is headed "Dedication in Time," a
proper heading, and since the first stanza concerns
itself with mortality, a proper pun. Here, at the close
of the eleven poems, the fugal subject is again stated
but now implicitly. The added and substantiating element,
such as has constituted the marrow of each restatement of
the subject, begins in the second stanza, "Abide with me;
do not go away." All efforts at gaining solace have
failed; there is none, but since there is none, perhaps,
at the very least, he can have company in his misery;
"Stay, then, stay! Wait now for me,/ Deliberately, with
care and circumspection" (p. 104). And the only way he
can have company is when the company is faithful within
the dynamic process, that is, faithful to each movement
78
within the dynamic process, that is, faithful to each
movement in "the dance":
When we are in step, running together,
Our pace equal, our motion one,
Then we will be well . . .
Parallel descent may yield "togetherness." There are
times when a fugue will seem to end, then slow down a bit
and drag out the end. Here the theme of flux so wonder
fully presented in poem four, would seem to make a
hysterical and appropriate ending: "We cannot stand
still: time is dying,/ We are dying: Time is farewell!"
(p. 104). But the poem slows all the way down to the
one-word line "Stop," then slowly picks up and, for the
first time in the section, ends on a forlorn though
mildly positive note. In a fugue this is called "Picardy
three"? what may have held minor notes is ended on a
major note adding a firmness and uplift to the feeling
of completion. And so this poem, and the fugal imita
tion, closes:
Walking together on the receding road,
Like Chaplin and his orphan sister,
Moving together through time to all good. (p. 104)
The fugal voices might be identified and correlated
with certain thematic notions under or above the levels
discussed— for instance one voice might be treating all
79
the themes related to the physical, another the metaphys
ical, etc. What enhancement more dissection might serve
up I do not know. What is significant is that this young
poet created a single work, each part of which glitters
with terrifying insight expressed in appropriate form. The
work as a Gestalt, breathes and lives. No matter which
statement of the fugal subject is examined, each is illu
minated by all the rest. And the illumination is pain.
Separate Lyrics
In addition to "Coriolanus and His Mother" and "The
Repetitive Heart," this first book contains twenty-four
separate lyrics covering, for so few poems, a wide range
of meters and forms. Schwartz was experimenting, no
doubt, but these verses, despite their variety, have a
very finished quality and some are, indeed, among the
best work he ever did. They range from a four-page free
verse dialogue, "Father and Son" to a brief, tight tri
meter lyric, "0 Love, Sweet Animal." Schwartz does not
hesitate to write one poem, "Faust in Old Age," in loose
rhyming couplets and end it with a prose quotation. Yet
the group ends with three respectable sonnets. On the
whole, these poems are tightly knit, only infrequently
80
sustaining the moments of prosiness which later are so
prevalent. Some are derivative, yet the strength of the
young poet is already evident in lines that are unmistak
ably his own.
Although Schwartz accepts and adopts influences, he
never really makes good use of tradition. In its con
text, this kind of comment may naturally sound complain
ing for the reason that the reader is being shown quali
ties which account for certain kinds of failures in the
poetry, that have been avoided by other, perhaps lesser,
talents. But now is the time for balancing; one of
Schwartz's greatest achievements is his ability to convey
the sense of being, the "withness" not of the "heavy
bear" alone but of the total self in the world. The one
never exists without the other— the self and the world—
no more for Schwartz than it does for Heidegger.
In Heidegger's analysis of the Sein zum Tode he
argues that only in death can we achieve onto<-
logical delimitation of Dasein's totality; and when
Dasein reaches its wholeness in death, it simul
taneously loses the Being of its "there."25
25
Richard A. Macksey, "The Climates of Wallace
Stevens," in The Act of Mind; Essays on the Poetry of
Wallace Stevens, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce and J. Hillis
Miller (Baltimore: 1965), p. 201.
81
But where Heidegger discusses the matter, Schwartz shares
the experience most momently, most how-it-is. This he
does better than any other poet of his generation and the
convolutions of self-consciousness, but obsessive concern
with origin and identity— these work to feed everything
in as grist for the same mill.
A man's life seen as a journey along a road is a
clich&; it is a poor figure not only because it is trite
but because it simplifies into distortion and error. A
man, as he lives, grows forward in a multidimensional
fashion— countless modes, levels, pockets, twists, de
tours, inclines. The variables are endless, the unique
possibilities inexhaustible. If we describe one or two
of these in our analysis of a poet, for instance, the
danger is that the selection alone serves to give an un
fortunate emphasis because the human being so described
is myriad and dynamic, not a set of obliging classifica
tions. All of this is by way of preparation for the
statement that as men grow up and develop, they stop at
one place and go on at others, build a mansion at one
point but neglect other points that seem equally feasible
to other men. Schwartz stopped, it seems to me, cold, at
the fact of consciousness; the wonder of it struck with a
82
force seldom experienced and this only is the sovereign
subject of all his work.
In the musical comedy, Man from La Mancha, there is
a scene where Don Quixote finally must meet The Great
Enchanter in combat. His opponent enters, thrusts up his
shield and suddenly Quixote is faced with a mirror which
is the face of the shield. Other mirrors spring up on
other arms all around him. Bewildered, he looks into
them and begins to weep. In one way, this is the predica
ment of Schwartz? not that he is concerned with self,
and with himself alone, but that he is concerned with the
fact of his own consciousness in the world, what it meant,
the experience of it physically as well as every other
way. Now this is for the majority of us a "given" from
which we go on. Schwartz went on, too, but he returned to
this seldom-framed infrequently-articulated "given" over
and over again, and the feel of it, the wonder of the
feel of it, found expression in everything he wrote.
But this must be qualified further. As already
suggested, the focus of artist and subject in the work of
Schwartz is none too close for the time in which he
wrote— a time when the division between the subjective and
the objective, within the accepted sense of reality, was
gradually growing narrower. This is true but not a
contradition of what is now being said: that Schwartz is
a wonderfully intimate writer. The effect of intimacy
is not gained in Schwartz's work by the means familiar
among writers today; journeys into the subconscious,
dredging up excusably distorted language in nets of
ellipses, pages of detail used to describe a second's
experience, demented landscapes and fragmented inscapes,
identities running like quicksilver into each other, com
bining, flowing, losing themselves— these are some of the
techniques of close focus of which Schwartz does not
avail himself. Never for a moment does he unstabilize
the medium focus with which he seeks to communicate.
This is a strength and a limitation; and within it, he
remains lucid, communicative, and compelling.
Now what I am trying to show consists mainly of
this: that although the focus of Schwartz's poetry— the
distance between the artist and the subject which in most
cases is the same between reader and subject ("subject”
being the same as "art work" or "art symbol")— is neither
far nor near but in the middle, the poetry achieves a
powerful intimacy. The problem is how can Schwartz's
work be both middle distant and intimate? Ordinarily
intimacy as I mean it— close to the writer, close to the
reader— is gained in our time through means such as I
have already listed. Schwartz makes use of other means;
the subject matter is one of these, as I have pointed out.
It is this fundamental theme which, as is rarely the case
in works of literature, is made explicit in his work.
Also, he is continuously explicit about usually private
matters of selfhood, unmasking being an important tool.
Also, the intimacy is gained by another factor entirely,
but one which hinges on what has just been said. It is
the time factor.
Robert Warshaw says that Schwartz "seems to me one
of the very few American writers who . . . set down the
true qualities of modern experience," and John Crowe
Ransom writes that Schwartz demonstrated "extreme intelli
gence in his probings of the modern world." Wallace
Stevens says that Schwartz is interested in things "as
they are seen from the point of view of the understandings
of recent years." Mark Van Doren refers to Schwartz's
stories as having a flavor "which suits perfectly with
the fact that the author lives . . . wholly in our
■ ,............. 85
26
time. Most of those who comment on Schwartz's stories
and poetry usually find themselves including something or
other about his contemporaneity. This refererce derives
from the experience of intimacy on the reading. It is
not his style, the tools he uses, that are so modern. It
is that he writes from a fix on the fact of being, on,
quite often, "being" itself; using the middle focus, late
nineteenth-century, early twentieth-, he brings this fact
into the reader's awareness, decorating it with a fine
set of readings from the cultural heroes of our society.
The wide reading he brought to his work contributes no
more, quite often, than decoration. This is because what
he is doing, although it looks like explanation, is
really illumination. The fact of being conscious in the
world can only be illuminated, not explained. Therefore,
when this fact becomes the main theme, the variegated
stock of additional insight and reference becomes as
externalized as a Matisse painting. Nothing is more up-to-
26
The comments here are taken from letters to Herbert
Creekmore of New Direction Press, in reply to his let
ters asking for comments on Schwartz's work. Creekmore
also sent some of Schwartz's books to these people,
including The World Is a Wedding. Permission to use the
letters granted by J. Laughlin, owner of New Directions
Press. (Italics supplied.)
86
date than the breathing of one's consciousness from moment
to moment. This is the greatest intimacy that time can
achieve for art— when art is only a split second away
from one's breathing self.
Perhaps there is no better poem to examine first
than his most anthologized piece, "In the Naked Bed, in
Plato's Cave." In the May, 1939, edition of Poetry
magazine, George O'Donnell wrote of Schwartz's first
volume, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities:
Schwartz is . . . more than a poet of the decade.
His achievement is three-fold. First of all, he
has orchestrated the central theme of his decade
more richly, more consistently, more intelligently
than any of his contemporaries. He rejects the
easy solutions of ideologies; . . . he takes the
hard way— to a solution in terms of poetry. (p. 107)
But further on O'Donnell, in evaluating the nature of
Schwartz's excellence, resorts to a set of phrases which
were stylish at the time. He speaks of the "particular
kind of poetic tension" which is Schwartz's "strategy."
Using the poem, "In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave," he
says that "an immediate tension is set up between the
- physical image and the philosophic concept," and at the
end of the poem "an affirmation combines the two elements
of the initial tension" (p. 105). Since the thirties,
the word "tension" has developed several meanings in
criticism, and it is a fact that O'Donnell's term is no
longer very helpful. Nevertheless, the fact remains that
there is an exciting juxtaposition of the Platonic ab
straction and the immediacy of physical being, the one
heightening the other by contrast. This is intensely
expressed in the very first line, which is also the title
of the poem. The phrase "the naked bed" brings to mind
the last line of the last lyric in this book, "Sonnet: 0
City, City"— "When in the white bed all things are made."
There is possibly no more pointed, skeletally powerful,
sexual vector than is provided by the application of the
adjective "naked" to "bed." The essence of all physical
life is here contained, the cup of earthy well-being, of
unsophisticated physical and mental consciousness could
be shared no more effectively.
This is abruptly followed by the phrase "in Plato's
cave." There are ways in which Schwartz's poetry— or
anyone's for that matter— delivers ideas; either the
idea is expressed in abstract terms extraneous to whatever
textural terms but not fully interfused with the rest of
the poem, or the idea is no longer abstract but has become
absorbed into the poetic context itself. This phrase,
"in Plato's cave," is an example of the second method—
88
the introduction of "Plato" produces the abstraction, the
use of Plato's famous figure of the cave as if it is not
an illustrative figure but a real cave. This is a bril
liant way to make the ideal real, or, better said, to
help the reader share with Schwartz the process of soph
isticating brutal and innocent physical life by adding to
it the complexities of mind— Blackmur might have called
this a violation of sensibility by idea. Part of the
reader shock occurs at the time the line is finished—
the realization that this warm "be-in" is open to com
plexities of interpretation which sum up to the possibil
ity that what is known there in the substantial bed is
far from substantial, is, in fact, only an imitation of
the "real" reality. At last this, in turn, adds up to
the additional stab of realization that this is the
young man's condition in the poem, that experience must
always be this combination of concrete and abstract.
The experience of lying in bed in the early morning
awake, alone, and aware is instantaneously shared. The
second line, "Reflected headlights slid slowly forth,"
heighten the effect of Plato's metaphor— the idea of
reflection brings in the whole set of associations linked
with "imitation," the introduction of moving lights
(headlights) reminds one of the shadows on the cave wall
cast by figures moving in front of the light shed by the
fire in front of the cave; at the same time the words act
on the real level so that the reader recognizes the ex
perience of seeing the strange sliding shapes of reflected
lights on the walls of the bedroom at night, and hearing
odd knocks inside and outside the house— "Carpenters ham
mered under the shaded window." He hears the milkman,
goes to the window, finds the sight of the sky too much
and goes back to bed. The sky here, in obedience to the
full effect of the metaphor, is the static reality of
forms posited by Plato— the true reality. Man glimpses
this only, can not achieve it for long. So— back to bed
and to sleep. Another, additional, association occurs;
the street and the buildings are also outside the cave.
Does "capital" suggest dome?
Then follows a description of the experience which
Schwartz found most meaningful, most wonderful— the awak
ening in the morning. The morning, for Schwartz, is
always the renewal, the unfolding of fresh consciousness,
the beginning all over again of the miracle of living.
Morning, softly
Melting the air, lifted the half-covered chair
From underseas, kindled the looking glass,
Distinguished the dresser and the white wall (p. 134)
90
At the end, one is reminded of the beginning. The "Plato's
cave" carries still another connotation; one feels the
vulnerability, the touching limitation of man as he wakes
in Plato's cave— this metaphor connected with one of the
great attempts to understand the world and an attempt
that marks limitation rather than conquest. He awakens:
Perplexed, still wet
With sleep, affectionate, hungry, cold. So, so,
0 son of man, the ignorant night, the travail
Of early morning, the mystery of beginning
Again and again
while History is unforgiven.
The end returns the reader to an abstraction, the capi
talized word, "History," clear, empty, abstract as earlier
in the poem in his reference to the night, he had written,
"The winter sky's pure capital." This is the capital,
the abstraction "History" which is "unforgiven," which
implies that it is irremediable and unredeemable, that
the waking to choice in many ways is illusion.
In an age of informality, the formality of the lan
guage in this poem is striking. Joyce spent a book
describing the experience of a sleeping and waking man,
and the smelting of new words came from the most intimate
recesses of the author, came almost raw and smoking into
congealing syntax and thence to the reader. None of this
occurs in Schwartz's work. The syntax is the syntax we
know— not even the inversions which have become so inter
esting and, in many cases, so successful. Thus the focus
remains at a distance; although it is about the revelation
of awakening in the morning, though it is a very personal
experience that is being related, the reality exhibited
is Cartesian. The room is there— outside of Schwartz as
are the horses, the street lamps, and the buildings. It
is the world with which we are familiar; it is the world
at a middle focus, split (healthily?) at some point into
the objective and the subjective. The language imputes
objectivity. So far as his style goes, for Schwartz
there is the intelligent knower on the one side and the
intelligible world on the other. This is one of the
assumptions back of the conforming syntax, the slowness
and prosiness of the line. The assets are clarity and
rationality in these early poems. And no wonder— his
style is dealing with the subject matter for which it was
designed, with the rational cultural buttressing furnished
by Schwartz's cultural heroes; in his later work, when his
fundamental subject, the self in its consciousness from
moment to moment, calls for greater concentration and
wider range, his style, seeking to embrace the irrational
within this rational frame/ can only diffuse and draw on
generality, repetition, and ritual. Techniques that
require a much closer focus do not seem available to him.
In short, one is never taken into the confidence of his
total response— only left, distrusted— on the doorstep of
a stylistically conventional edifice. But none of this
would be noted were it not that the apparent subject
matter is so intimate, and that the writing is so recent;
long after Rimbaud, writers all the way to John Ashbery
have shown how the closer-focused sense of process-real-
ity can be embodied in a fresh style. It well may be
that ultimately better means of expressing this sense of
reality will be found than linear, sequential verbaliza
tion. Schwartz's early poems seem to form on the level
indicated; nevertheless, their freshness in American
literature is undeniable.
"The Ballad of the Children of the Czar" (p. 113)
27
was first published in The Partisan Review; it marks
one of his earliest attempts in the simple flat style
"to declare," as he writes in his preface to "Genesis,"
"The miraculous character of daily life and ordinary
^January, 1937, pp. 29-31.
............ 93
speech" (p. ix). It is a poem of eighty-two lines divided
into six sections and written in unrhymed couplets. The
first section introduces the bouncing ball, Schwartz's
symbol for novelty in reality, the uncontrollable factor,
careless destiny— the same bouncing ball to which and
from which people turn for solace in the opening poem of
"The Repetitive Heart":
The children of the czar
Played with a bouncing ball.
In the May morning, in the czar's garden
Tossing it back and forth. (p. 113)
The use of the children of the Czar in their apparent
security rings an ominous note; their destiny is known.
Also the background of the poet is associated as the
reader discovers in section two, which stays in the same
time period but skips to America:
While I ate my baked potato
Six thousand miles apart,
In Brooklyn, in 1916
Aged two, irrational (p. 115)
0 Nicholas 1 Alasl Alasl
My grandfather coughed in your army
Then left for America
To become a king himself. (p. 116)
The shift shows the far distant effects of ancestry in
the process of reaching across the globe (another ball)
"......' 94
to determine the life of the poet. Part six makes this
explicit in the quiet simple style.
I am my father's father,
You are your children's guilt, (p. 114)
In this poem the theme of freedom of will is considered
from several perspectives and effectively dramatized in
apparently simple factual statements which are neither
factual nor simple.
The child is Aeneas again;
Troy is in the nursery,
The rocking horse is on fire. (p. 114)
Aeneas defended Troy in innocence, never suspecting that
the gift of the horse would be his undoing and would
determine his destiny. The tenor of this metaphor is the
child, the young author accepting the gift of himself from
his father without realizing the factor of determinism.
The quiet statements continue to a climactic close. The
next section goes back to the doomed brother and sister,
children of the Czar, who are bouncing "the bounding,
unbroken ball," "unbroken," carrying a connotation of the
far-reaching and inviolable connection between these
children and their destiny and the poet and his. The
connection is the illusion of free will which masked both
sets of determined lives and, as the poet-^writes in Part V,
95 ' '
"makes no will glad." But though the children are inno
cent since they are not aware of the illusions and dan
gers of thinking, they are handling the ball, they are,
at the same time, not innocent since
They are their father's fathers,
The past is inevitable, (p. 115)
They inherit from, thus reconstitute, remoter ances
tors. This is a theme that permeates all of his work.
It permeated his life as well; he often reviewed the
smallest incidents in his life, going over his childhood
with a fine comb. This compulsion is one of the links in
the chain that kept Schwartz from sounding more modern.
What he searched for was meaning, hidden meaning, and
found that
Troy is in the nursery
The rocking horse is on fire. (p. 114)
In the end, he told a friend that he was for "The Good,
the True and the Beautiful," behind which is the insist
ence on the rational and therefore on the meaningful. In
an age of irrational man, this compulsion to find meaning
that fits a matrix of rationality results in an old
sound; it is the sound of culture as we have known it in
the past. Though the topics are modern and the presen
tation fine, some of the poems lack the breathtaking
..........96
quality of contemporary experience which many lesser
poems seem to have. This deficiency may not seem pos
sible in a poet for whom the here and the now is a major
theme, but, on the level of philosophic style and liter-
airy style it is the case.
Section six, the final part of the poem, brings all
of the children together in the similarity of their
experiences. If they knew what was happening to them as
the poet now, at the time of writing knows, they would
all have grown up at the same moment and through the same
experience. The poet, aged two, is in his highchair,
playing with his baked potato, his "buttered world" and
this is also a ball that can bounce (and smash!), for it
falls off his plate on to the floor and he begins to cry.
At the same time the poet has a vision:
And I see the ball roll under
The iron gate which is locked.
Sister is screaming, brother is howling,
The ball has evaded their will.
And is under the garden wall.
I am overtaken by terror
Thinking of my father's fathers,
And of my own will. (p. 116)
This is a wonderfully controlled expression of intense
terror. The diction is very like the simple statements
........97
that comprise Stevens' "The Man with the Blue Guitar."
In this economy of rhetoric, the important communication
is through the accumulation of such statements. There are
parts like this in other Schwartz poems, but few of the
poems are pitched all the way through in this deadly
quietude.
Throughout In Dreams Begin Responsibilities Delmore
Schwartz makes no bones about his cultural forebears; in
various contexts he evokes the spirits of Socrates, Marx,
Freud, Beethoven, Mozart, and Picasso, and makes other
references to Rilke, Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, Shakespeare,
Baudelaire, Holderlin, and Vivaldi. His personal library
at the time of his death consisted of 144 books, of which
the important ones— only a very few— are wildly annotated.
His copy of Ulysses looks like the Talmud, a small amount
of text lost in a scribble of commentary. His Rilke—
Duino Elegies— is not far behind in the accumulation of
marginalia.
As for more direct influence on his poetry, there is
little doubt that Yeats, Eliot, and Auden played the
major roles, while Rilke and Joyce were his later preoc
cupations. And Shakespeare was always present, much more
so in Schwartz's writings than in that of any of his
98
contemporaries.
It is not hard to hear the Audenesgue voice— "he is
the one you do not know, my dear," (p. 88), "Moving
together through time to all good" (p. 104), or the
Eliot influence, "Which I shall suffer and act again"
(p. 94), "Little they get. Being nor good nor evil/
Except as driven, they desire merely/ A bit of salt for
cucumbers in May/ A movie once a week, a game to play"
(p. 43), or Yeats both in the rhetoric and in the rhythm,
"And that strange man on the cross" (p. 121) and "Lest
their infinite play/ And their desires be/ Shadow and
Mockery" (p. 121). Schwartz makes use of the trimeter in
the fashion of Yeats but with a harder surface of both
rhetoric and idea which more closely resemble early poems
by Auden. Often both influences reign simultaneously.
The six lyrics which include the Auden and Yeats
influence are spare, tight, and of considerable distinc
tion; they possess a pared-down quality never equalled in
the later poems, which are softer and comparatively
relaxed. Taken in their order of appearance in Schwartz's
first volume, they begin with the beautiful "Socrates'
Ghost Must Haunt Me Now" (p. 118). This poem is a com
pendium of Schwartz's main themes set in a tetrameter
which is speeded up by introductory trochees and an
occasional extra syllable. The tone is exultant and
hopeful— based on the fact that Socrates' message is "I
do not know I do not know." The poet faces him with his
situation, which Socrates describes in six lines before
he gives his final comment. The reader will recall the
situation— that man has only the illusion of freedom and
this is based in the "Whims of appetite," that he is
small and limited— "the butterfly caged in electric
light," and also subject to illusion, "Love is not love,
it is a child/ Sucking his thumb and biting his lip"
(p. 118).
Schwartz is certainly a child of his time; his per
spective is his own brand of Freudian existentialism.
His concern with freedom, with the Now and the experience
of Being recalls Sartre but more the Sartre of La Nausee
than of L'Etre and le Neaht. It is true that Schwartz
has a penchant for interspersing his verse with the
metaphysical, but even more characteristic, as has been
demonstrated, is his effort to think about and to convey
the experience of being and body, a general and a particu
lar just as Roguentin in La Naus&e philosophizes about
his perceptions and feelings. Only the philosophic
100
portion of this is in "Socrates' Ghost Must Haunt Me
Now," for this poem is a fairly explicit philosophic
statement carrying the emotional overtone. "In the Naked
Bed, In Plato's Cave" is a better example of the combina
tion.
No more direct or pointed statement of Schwartz's
concern with a deterministic past in a violent present—
both knit by self or self-hood— can be found in his work
than the brief, Audenesgue "By Circumstances Fed." This
is quoted in full since it is a clear statement of
Schwartz's deepest preoccupation— his own being— set
against the themes just stated so that these are the
frame or background:
By circumstances fed
Which divide attention
Among so many dead,
Even in the blooming sun,
For this is not ended,
Never having begun,
And this is attended
By a fire-like power,
Converting every feature
Into its own nature,
As, once in the drugstore,
Between salves and ointments
I suddenly saw, so strange there,
Amid the sand and soda,
Rich in all appointments,
My own face in the mirror, (p. 123)
The first ten lines are admirably condensed— two stresses
in each line. When the poet moves into the presentation
101
of the concrete experience he requires more room in the
liner he expands, as if it takes more words, more quali
fications to present the physical world than to present
ideas. The stretching, oddly enough, speeds the lines
rather than relaxes them— possibly because of the extra
syllable and the feminine ending of each line. And when,
in his later poetryr Schwartz teies to describe the com
bination— the celebration of the physical world as it is
transcended in a reaching toward the metaphysical— the
poet attempts a fusion of the concrete and abstract via
feeling, the line further expands just like a solid being
turned into a gas; it occupies more space but becomes
more tenuous.
The last line of "By Circumstances Fed" is the
subject of which the first line phrase headed by an under
stood "is" is the predicate. Thus its reference is to
"my own face in the mirror/ By circumstances fed ..."
The first three lines refer, of course, to the theme of
origins, with the denial of free will; added to this the
fourth line introduces the blazing present in "The bloom
ing sun," and the feeling of continuous process which is
often conveyed in Schwartz's poetry by the use of such
words as "endless" and "inexhaustible," and also by the
word "amid" which is used in most of his poems; "amid"
emphasizes the fullness or plentitude of things, the fact
of inescapable and endless context. In addition, Schwartz
adds that all this is "attended by a fire-like power"
that converts everything to its own nature. This is
Schwartz's portrayal of the self— both the physical—
"Time is the fire in which we bum"— self, and the psyche
(Coriolanus). Now it is not merely that he characterizes
the self as converting everything to its own nature which
is as much a statement of ordinary anthropomorphism as
anything else, but it is the additional preoccupation
with his own face which begins to tint this with Narcis
sism. Finally, in the adjective "strange," both the shock
at the fact of consciousness and the attempt to realize
self-hood or identity are fully communicated.
"Saint, Revolutionist" (p. 121) is written in a
Yeatsian trimeter; it is, in fact, more Yeats than
Schwartz, especially the last two stanzas. Also, Yeats
took from Blake and so does Schwartz— "Neither in hell or
heaven/ Is the answer given" (p. 121). In this poem
Schwartz pauses to ruminate; it is perhaps natural that
the meditative note should be picked up from Yeats, who
was such a master of it that even the trimeter such as
Schwartz uses here is able to sustain it. The pause is
real, the meditation true, for Schwartz is considering a
matter which is in one sense alien to his own nature.
Though he will make immeasurable sacrifice in asserting
the sovereignty of poetry and in meeting the expense of
being a poet, he is never capable of the abnegation of
the saint or revolutionist. In him, self is always as
sertive. Yet his own sacrifice leads him to consider the
odd nature of the total sacrifice made by a saint or a
revolutionist. It is a problem which once nonplussed
Kenneth Burke, who felt that there is something drasti
cally wrong about the fact that when we recommend some
thing most highly we say either that men are devoting
their lives to it, or that men are dying for it. Schwartz
is concerned with the motivation of the saint or the
revolutionist who dies for the cause. He concludes that
hell or heaven are both "servant's pay," and that these
are not the concerns of the saint or the revolutionist.
They must exist "where no will can descend," because
they wish to know
How far the will can go,
Lest their infinite play
And their desires be
Shadow and mockery. (p. 121)
Schwartz has taken the matter from transcendental arenas
104
and uncovered its fundamental necessity— to make signifi
cance of life. This is the will of the saint and the
revolutionist and set beyond opposing wills. It is, of
course, the will of the poet, too.
Will is one matter, but free will is another. The
man who has free will is the man who can make a choice.
He is the one who unhesitatingly makes decisions that
involve other lives, the one who "is willing" to act.
Schwartz addresses a poem to him— "For the One Who Would
Take Man's Life in His Hands." This, too, carries over
tones from Yeats, but it is a far better poem than "Saint,
Revolutionist." The iambic tetrameter occasionally
rushed along by an introductory trochee has been used by
Yeats, as has the mode of questioning and answering by
the personae in the poem. And Yeats, more than once,
concerned himself in his poetry with the differences
between the activist life and the quietist life— opposing
terms in Schwartz's poem as well.
Schwartz begins by citing circumstances in life or
literature which demonstrate a fundamental irony,
Tiger Christ unsheathed his sword,
Threw it down, became a lamb.
Swift spat upon the species, but
Took two women to his heart.
Samson who was strong as death
Paid his strength to kiss a slut. (p. 120)
105
The stanza thus gives examples of battlers who contradict
their natures by loving, who are, indeed, betrayed by
love. The second stanza is explicit about the irony,
reveals the contradiction clearly in explaining why these
men turned to women.
When all are killed, you are alone
A vacuum comes where hate has fed
Love is the tact of every good,
The only warmth, the only peace.
If the soldier is the activist and if Schwartz is dealing
in contradictions here, then, of course, the lover is the
quietist. And the lover is not concerned with the domi
nation of other people's lives. -Soldier or lover, the
man who makes a choice is involved in a universe filled
with contradiction. Identifying with his mask, Socrates,
Schwartz adds,
"What have I said?" asked Socrates,
"Affirmed extremes, cried yes and no,
Taken all parts, denied myself,
Praised the caress, extolled the blow,
Soldier and lover quite deranged
Until their motions are exchanged, (p. 120)
And he answers with a caution "For the One Who Would Take
Man's Life in His Hands,"
What can any actor know?
The contradiction in every act,
The infinite task of the human heart, (p. 120)
106
This is one of Schwartz's earliest explicit statements of
his concern with the fact of contradiction. His own
heart, as time passed, set itself this "infinite task"
and in the effort to contain paradox, expanded to the
breaking point. Yet never again in his work— beyond the
poems in this group— did Schwartz give profound expression
such economy.
"Dr. Bergen's Belief"
The final piece in this volume is "Dr. Bergen's
Belief," a one-act closet drama, like "Coriolanus and
His Mother,"it is partly prose and partly verse, but now
Schwartz uses neither spectators nor interlocutor.
The main conflict in the play is between Dr. Bergen
and his wife, whose position is strengthened by Dr. New
man, just as Dr. Bergen's position is temporarily
strengthened by the presence of his disciples. The plot
is straightforward and uncomplicated. Dr. and Mrs. Ber
gen have had two daughters; the older one has recently
committed suicide. Dr. Bergen believes that she killed
herself because of one of the doctrines of a new religion
which he had set up a year before, and of which she was
an adherent. He believes that she could not fully enough
107
examine her heart to know what she really wanted of life
and thatr in obedience to his doctrine, she sought an
intuitive understanding using the perspective of death.
Mrs. Bergen is ready to have him committed unless he
drops the support of both the religion and the disciples,
many of whom he is supporting. She complains bitterly
about him to Dr. Newman, her daughter's doctor. There is
a ritual service of the new religion held by Dr. Bergen
and his nine disciples and witnessed by Mrs. Bergen, Dr.
Newman, and Anthony, his older daughter's fianc£. After
the service, Dr. Bergen and Dr. Newman argue about the
plausibility of Dr. Bergen's belief— the intuitions and
convictions, and whether or not they are capable of proof.
Dr. Newman shows a letter he received from the daughter
in which she confesses that she killed herself because of
her hopeless love for a married man. Shocked by Dr.
Newman's revelation, Dr. Bergen, still announcing faith
in his beliefs, and seeking to gain the further perspec
tive he claims can be found in death, leaps over the
balustrade to the street fifteen stories below.
The work starts with an introduction, a speech by
Dr. Bergen which one can presume sets forth the theme of
the play; based on this speech it appears that the key
108
word in the title is "belief" and that, probably "Bergen"
which in German means mountains, implies "heights" which,
in turn, are rarefied, and thus bring in the association
of ideals and abstractions. A more direct connection
between the name and the theme comes to light a bit later
in the play— the central religious insight of Dr. Bergen
is that the sky is the great blue eye of God.
He begins with a simple statement of disappointed
belief, "There is no Santa Claus” (p. 141) . Equated with
this statement is the following, "A final emptiness con
fronts your eyes" (p. 141). This was written a long time
after Matthew Arnold, more than a decade after "The
28
Wasteland," and before the publication of Tate's "Son-
2Q
nets at Christmas." The alternative then and now, but
perhaps not in the future, is that without belief there
is only emptiness. Thus Schwartz moves to broaden the
theme. The posture of prayer is like that of "The sad
comedian of cane and derby" (p. 142). "Prayer," he
2 8
T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-
1950 (New York: 1962), p. 37.
29
Oscar Williams (ed.), A Pocket Book of Modern
Verse; Allen Tate, "Sonnets at Christmas" (New York:
1953), p. 413.
109
writes, "is now ridiculous" (p. 142). No image of for
giveness, justice, lovingkindness, and good will is pos
sible any longer. Instead, the reader is returned from
the "bergen" of image and ideal, to the concrete particu
lar, "One knows that heaven is epiphenomenal/ Rising from
peaked musicians with bad complexions" (p. 142).
Dr. Bergen affirms the need for belief and he
promises to speak out. He knows us all, knows what we
want, "which is, though vaguely, all," (p. 143) and he
lists the countless needs and desires, but “none of these
things are given . . . you get what you do not want, what
M 9
you do not need” (p. 143). We get patience and naivete,
and hope, "perplexed affection, inexhaustible will" {p.
143). This accumulates to "a boredom no man escapes"
(p. 143). Then he asks the ultimate question, "What is
this life? What can man ask to have?" (p. 143).
I wish to draw attention to the form of the question.
It could provide all the material needed for a full
analysis of the rhetoric and the philosophy of Delmore
Schwartz. It is as direct, as honest a question as can
be, and it is the equivalent in one line of all the
emptiness Schwartz has been at pains to describe in the
play thus far. As a philosopher, Schwartz pushes himself
110
to the furthest limit— here is a line he wrote about
certain great writers: "They skin themselves alive . . .
to find the truth."30
He has asked his question; now in the same compara
tively artless fashion he must deliver his answer. And
so, after this introduction, the play begins. In extreme
ly irregular pentameter, Anthony makes the opening speech;
he complains that he can not understand the unhappiness
that must have driven Eleanor to her death. He criti
cizes her father and his disciples:
Here they construct a system to make their lives
Self-regarding, self-gratifying, self-conscious,
Indulging their minds in the old foolishness.
The vain vanity; to correct the heart of man . . .
(p. 144)
This, in his initial years of writing, could well be
a statement of Schwartz's own aim; what comes out of a
full consideration of his work is that he is a teacher
and a poet who, driven by impulses toward purism and
extremes, limited, nevertheless, by self-consciousness
and what he referred to as "self-hood," tends toward
didacticism and seership. Schwartz was shamelessly
30
"The Masters of the Heart Touched the Unknown,"
Vaudeville for a Princess (New York; 1950), p. 35.
HI
"self-regarding"— his form of honesty— certainly "self-
gratifying" and always "self-conscious." All of this
revolves around "self." When the activity of the "self"
is dictated by such concerns and when this is seen from
the outside, it is invariably called "indulging"; as for
"foolishness,” Schwartz was never one to hide his own and
frequently exhibited it in the form of caricature or
clowning, in several places explicitly referring to
himself as a clown. Now absolutely none of this should
act to lessen Schwartz as a man or a writer; his monu
mental honesty, his insistence on personal integrity and
his vitality and charm have been noted elsewhere and are
here noted again. His importance as a writer is the
stipulation of this paper. These matters are mentioned
only to help one surprise the young Schwartz at his work,
to delve as accurately as possible into aim and motiva
tion. "Dr. Bergen's Belief" is the oddest piece of writ
ing published by a good poet of Schwartz's generation. I
suggest that it is very close to the poet himself, that
it is, in essence, a ritual monologue, weakly dramatized
by characters who are not characters, and an allegory
acting out intellectual and emotional problems that re
volve around Schwartz's inability to believe. It contains
■ ' 112 ;
contradictions partly because rich symbolization is al
ways ambiguous, but also because the author himself was
troubled by contradictions. Schwartz was an intellectual
square like Thomas Mann, and was fascinated as the clear
and sound body of his thought and feeling gradually moved
into areas of greater ambiguity and more formidable con
tradiction. There are minds, like Andre Gide's, for
instance, that entertain such anomalies with greater
ease. There are other minds, like Rimbaud's, that bring
no solid body of assimilated dogma to oppose contradic
tion and that, therefore, find it, simply, reality.
Believing that belief is not possible, Schwartz
deliberately chooses a manifestly impossible belief, but
one which also bears a powerful moral aspect; if the sky
is the eye of God then we are all under constant surveil
lance. We do nothing that is not looked at. The poet
makes use of this in a later poem, about the effect
created on His disciples by the life of Christ, the refrain
of which is, "No matter what we do, he looks at it."3*
If we are seen at all times— except night when the eye
31
"Starlight Like Intuition Pierced the Twelve," in
Vaudeville for a Princess (New York: 1950), p. 47.
........................ 113"
is closed— then each action has weight and must stand
judgment. The idea of an aware God carries with it the
idea of God's values, and anyone can take it from there!
Thus, the need to believe, when satisfied, is shown—
simply by making use of the specific chosen symbol— to
be based in the ridiculous, the poetic, the judgmental,
even though it returns mankind to a vast importance—
which is the asset among all the liabilities.
It follows, naturally, that the religious service
starts with "imperatives” (p. 151) , and Dr. Bergen reads
the disciples "this week's version of our first impera
tive" (p. 151). If one understands that the prose para
graphs of the imperatives are really vows and comments
made to himself by the poet--values, aims that a young
writer might write in his notebooks— rather than a code
suggested for all mankind as the imperative purports to
be, then these ideas lose their quality of oddness and,
becoming less pretentious as well, are open to acceptance
and criticism.
The disciples are told to be carefully conscious of
what happens to them from moment to moment, of all they
do, of all that is done to them, to be self-conscious "of
the complexities of the personal event" (p. 151), writing
.......114
all that happens at night in a book, reading the book
later with "shame, remorse and astonishment." A true and
wonderful dictum follows:
Do not be concerned with the false tone, the affected
phrasing, the necessary pretentiousness of all self-
consciousness. But deny the desire to invent, dis
tort, defend, omit, forget when confronted with your
own foolishness, (p. 151)
This is a prescription for honesty in a writer. In
Schwartz's case there is no doubt that he followed it.
It could not, however, be relied upon to be a perpetual
shield, an apology or explanation for other omissions and
transgressions; it is strong as a dictum but thin, weak,
and ultimately destructive as one's only mode for any and
all occasions. It is all very well to give one's kingdom
for a horse, but a single horse can carry one only so
far.
The second imperative continues the effort of self-
awareness and adds "articulateness" (p. 154) to it.
Again the disciples are cautioned to sharpen their aware
ness of what happens to them; they are told again to
speak out without hesitation, without fear of arousing
resentment or of being laughed at, "For frankness, sin
cerity, articulation and explicitness are the attributes
of the man aware that God's blue eye regards him" (p.
115
154). Taken at the fundamentalist level, this seems like
an admission that judgment from above is necessary if
human beings are to act as their best selves. Taken
metaphorically, it can only mean that good and honest
men are good and honest. Also, it is questionable wheth
er the fear of God need necessarily involve articulate
ness. Silence is not in itself a sign of slackness or
evil.
n
"Adopt with voluntary act the naive, the ingenuous,
the stupid" (p. 154). This is a direct command to put
on a mask, unless it means that one should accept those
who are naxve, etc. In the former case, it is in opposi
tion to all the foregoing tenets that stress honesty and
openness. In the latter, it is found in Thomas Aquinas,
who proposed that spiritual perfection need not be in
volved with intellectual perfection; this is also to be
found in the writings of other Christian mystics where it
emphasizes love for all mankind, even for the lowest, and
it is developed in Dostoevsky. Such a theme— so far, at
least— seems to have little bearing in Schwartz's context
unless it is part of the effort toward virtue, and then,
it is Christian virtue which is being emphasized— really
in contradistinction to most of Schwartz's tendencies,
which are nothing if they are not of Judaic origin. In
fact, in a line a bit further on at the close of this
imperative, Schwartz writes, "Gross, clumsy, foolish?
Pride, dignity, assurance/ Are nothing without the power
of righteousness, but once righteous,/ They are garments,
sweet fruits, the best pleasures of man” (p. 154). Here
is phrasing very reminiscent of the first testament. All
of this is an indication, I think, of the fact that
whereas the statements taken as imperatives to mankind
are garbled and often inapplicable, if they are under
stood as advice to himself as a young man and a young
writer, they do make sense. They remind one of the aris
tocratic personal code by which Lafcadio rewarded and
punished himself in "Lafcadio's Adventures," originally
called "The Vatican Hoax," by Andre Gide.
Advice to the writer makes more sense especially in
the third imperative when he writes,
Resort to a painstaking examination in the fullness
of consciousness . . . grasp the care involved
in such statements as "salt," "sugar," "a gleaming
automobile" (p. 155)
What bearing does this have on the final statement in
this imperative?
. . . your decision can be true only if you open
your heart and give your mind to that being whose
117
blue eye is actual in the arching, domed and in
eluctable scene which is infinite overhead, your
decision before that being's blue eye,
In whom "Justice," "Truth," "Beauty" are genuine
and absolute. (p. 156)
The connection is only that the former quotation is an
example of a leaning toward the justice and truth referred
to in the latter quotation. But this, in the light of
Schwartz's subsequent life as a writer did have bearing.
It is the abstract, Platonic side; it is the part which
receives special attention later in a section of his
book, Vaudeville for a Princess, called "The Good, the
True, the Beautiful." The extremes, the real and the
ideal, the abstract and the concrete, jostle each other
in most of Schwartz's writing.
The group now beg'ins a part of the ritual which Dr.
Bergen calls "Witness and Testimony" (p. 156). It refers
to the innermost thoughts, cares, and observations of the
disciples. These are spoken out at the meeting and
commented on in a sentence or two by Dr. Bergen. Each
gives testimony to the fact that he met some inner prob
lem and by honesty and effort gleaned a lesson from it,
or, if it was invidious, conquered it. One is reminded
of a word and the experience for it which is current
today— confrontation. Schwartz was experimenting— at
118
least imaginatively— with the experience of confrontation
then, and from what one knows of him personally, continued
to do so for the rest of his life.
The testimonials continue. At the close, Martha,
Eleanor's sister, remarks that in a dream she was trying
to open Eleanor's forehead and look inside and that "I
told her how noble she had been to kill herself and how
it had helped all of us" (p. 160). Here is the third
sign of the disintegrating effect that Dr. Bergen's belief
has on the members of his family— the first being his
wife's distress for him, the second, his older daughter's
demise. The remark is altogether inappropriate, showing
little feeling— schizoid, one might say. The belief is
emphasized, not the person, which is also contrary to the
precepts of the religion itself. Martha believes with
Dr. Bergen that "She killed herself because she had come
to the impasse where she could not understand her own
heart . . . except by examining her heart in the per
spective of death" (p. 160). It should be made clear, at
this point, that Schwartz truly believed— and not without
much to be said for it— that one should imaginatively
realize the fact of one's death as continuously as pos
sible and see everything against this fact as backdrop.
119
He is not alone with the notion, but, of course, it does
come to many American readers with a shock because we are
part of a society that accents youth and plays down death.
Death for Americans is smothered under a pile of euphe
misms; witness the elaborate efforts to make the accept
ance of the "transition" as smooth and unnoticeable as
possible; except for the one appropriate moment in the
velvet chapel, rawness and feeling are discouraged.
Naturally, then, the less said honestly about the transi
tion to nothingness, the better. Here in the center of
Dr. Bergen's belief, however, such a circumstance is ac
cepted and one would expect that, honesty prevailing, it
would certainly encompass a realistic attitude toward
death. But this is not so, and Martha and Dr. Bergen
insist on coloring Eleanor's death, on exploiting it for
the sake of doctrine, and, more profoundly, for their own
sakes, for the perpetuation of the metaphysics which, as
it turns out, protects them from the necessity of suffer
ing the truth— at least for a time. The falsity at the
core of all the protestations of honesty must exist because
the honesty is set, also, in a context which is the so
ciety which they are living in as it has been described.
Just as amelioration, compromise, and cover up exist in
120
the society, the very attempt to fight against it suffers
from the same disease, but only because it is an incom
plete method of battling. As Schwartz points out by the
action of the play, the flight to metaphysics, dogma, and
ideal, though seemingly noble, since it is incomplete is
about as effective as the action of ostriches. And just
as devastating.
The idea that a sense of history lends a fuller
actuality to our apprehension of life and prevents the
present from distorting the view occurs often in
Schwartz's poetry, but it is nowhere more beautifully
expressed than in Eleanor's song which, now, is played
for the disciples on the Victrola:
I said, as by the river, we
Gazed at the sliding water's grey,
"This life's a dream, as others say,
A dream confirmed when memory
Holds up the past and dims the day,
As in the future we shall see
The present quickly passed away,
Irrelevant to our belief,
Misunderstood as every play,
Full of a secret actuality
Which worked its wish consummately
And held the conscious will at bay. (p. 161)
Now, the play is about to close; Dr. Bergen engages
Dr. Newman in an argument about his belief, admitting,
finally, that it is based on intuition, can be neither
121
proven nor disproven. He speaks with certainty, with
exaltation, and one is inexorably reminded of Woodrow
Wilson at the height of his idealistic misconceptions.
Smiling with assurance, Dr. Bergen says, "I have direct
experience of what I assert, the only means of arriving
at certainty" (p. 165). Dr. Newman withholds no longer;
he tells him, in brief, that Eleanor committed suicide
for no reason other than that she was hopelessly in love
with a married man who had no intention of leaving his
wife. To prove his contention, Dr. Newman shows Dr.
Bergen a letter from Eleanor that was posted only an hour
before her death. In it, she admits her reason for kill
ing herself, and adds that she is allowing her father to
believe what he wishes about the matter because in that
way she will at least be useful for once. Dr. Bergen
appears humbled for a moment. Anthony, the betrayed
fianc£, delivers a speech in which he comments on himself
and illusion. In it he brings up the matter of belief:
Belief contrives
A curious house, peculiar pyramid
Which narrows as it must to nothingness.
And on that tiny top we stand until
The actual sand shifts as it must, betrays
The desert of our lives, our broken sleep, (p. 167)
The subject is betrayal by belief. But Dr. Bergen does
122'
not accept this, "That doe e not apply to me. I did not
deceive. I was not deceived, except by one poor, miser
able distraught girl . . . But I was not deceived in all,
only in her" (p. 168). He steps from the long table to
the parapet and tells the group that he, too, will kill
himself because he is sincere, because "the horror of
doubt crowds my mind, and I cannot endure it" (p. 168).
He explains that he went, in his life, from one type of
partial satisfaction to another until, one day, he sud
denly realized the pure fact that the moment was continu
ously and relentlessly approaching when he would die,
when his body would rot. He spent a year in the deepest
despondency until he began to undergo the special exper
iences which gave him his insight and belief and changed
all. Now he has nothing left but the will to know. He
jumps to his death as several scream. Rakovsky, one of,
his disciples, Anthony, and Dr. Newman each make one
remark at the close of the curtain:
Rakovsky: Knowledge and belief devour the mind of
man.
Anthony: Belief, knowledge, and desire— desire most
of all.
Dr. Newman: Man destroys his own heart. (p. 171)
So ends this play— on the problem of belief. It is
peculiarly cramped as a play, partly because the emphasis
is intellectual, partly because there is not much conflict
or plot, but mainly because there is no characterization.
The dialogue, as stated earlier is really a monologue in
prose and poetry. The conflict between abstract or meta
physical ideal and concrete reality, between the need to
believe even in the most outlandish notions and the
necessity to do without, has been stated many times in
works of art. Don Quixote comes to mind as a fuller,
richer figure, clothed in a nobility and romance not
vouchsafed to Dr. Bergen. Compared to Quixote, Bergen's
is a narrow, self-centered viewpoint and this is, perhaps,
as it should be, for the author— if the double-suicide
plot means anything— means to show the kinds of dangers
in certain kinds of needs to believe.
CHAPTER II
SHENANDOAH AND "PARIS AND HELEN"
In addition to Dr. Bergen's Belief," Schwartz pub
lished two verse plays— "Shenandoah"1 and "Paris and
2
Helen." Both of these appeared two years after the
first— in 1941. This interim seems to have allowed for a
ripening; in "Shenandoah" Schwartz addresses himself to a
theme which is part of his own social experience and one
which evidently taps a reservoir of feeling; it is a
touching play. The blank verse is fuller, more substan
tial; put another way, the poet is not afraid of meeting
the fullness of the iambic pentameter, of admitting it,
and making use of it. In his earlier verse he plays
around it, seems evasive as if he wished to create a
spanking new sound, a sophistication that frequently left
^“ Shenandoah (Norfolk, Conn.: 1941).
2
New Directions in Prose and Poetry, 1941 (Norfolk,
Conn.: 1941), pp. 129-138.
124
' ...'.- .... 125
his lines flat or prosy. In this little play his orotund
ideas find ample voice. Also, in this play, he draws
directly on his Jewish heritage.
Shenandoah is a play about the naming of a baby boy.
Among the Jewish people, this is done at the same time
that the child is circumsized, and the attendant ritual
is very dignified. Since early history such rituals have
been important events. Magic surrounds naming. The
Cabala was concerned with naming and numbers. In essence,
the concern was with esoteric meaning, the feeling of
deep-lying significance and, therefore, with meaning and,
most important, ultimate meaning. If "Dr. Bergen's
Belief" lays bare the failure of our belief in our time
even when the ability to believe is not lost, then, in
Shenandoah Schwartz offers a play which also celebrates
significance of a kind which is involved with an ultimate
though comparatively secular belief— naming the newborn
son. The importance of the naming, both every-day and
magical, is made clear by the family discussions and the
presence throughout the play of the mature Shenandoah as
commentator on the proceedings. By this time, one must
see that Schwartz in no way takes any of the suggestions
of T. S. Eliot in his essay, "Tradition and Individual
126
Talent"; there is never an abeyance of the personal, or a
channeling of the personal through the traditional. If
some recent trends in contemporary poetry are identified
as "confessional poetry," then Schwartz should be recog
nized as the modern father of the school. It will be
shown that without the mitigation of tradition— though
Schwartz's influences are, in most cases, obvious (Eliot,
Auden, Yeats)— Schwartz had to fall back again and again
on the "I." In Shenandoah alone, he allows himself the
respite of fairly traditional blank verse and an occa
sional Biblical phrasing and rhythm. He invites the
reader at the very beginning of the play;
Return with me, stand at my point of view,
Regard with my emotion the small event
Which gave my mind and gave my character,
Amid the hundred thousand possibilities
Heredity and community avail,
Bound and engender,
the very life I knowl (p. 7)
And again, as in the short story, "In Dreams Begin Re
sponsibilities," he goes back to his origins, as if ori
gins explain everything: "The curtain rises on a dining
room/ In the lower middle class in 1914" (p. 7). And if
the theme of the play needs further clarification, one
need only look at the quotation at the beginning of the
play; it is from the Encyclopaedia Brittanica; "It is the
' " 127
historic nature of all particulars to try to prove that
they are universal by nature ..." The particular,
Delmore Schwartz chose, by and large, to emphasize in his
poetry was his own uniqueness, his own particularity.
The assumption is that a paradigm is offered here, and
analogies can be made and conclusions drawn by the rest
of mankind. This is certainly the implication of most
confessional poetry; the personal, lyrical note is struck
more strongly each decade as if in defiance of society's
antiseptic corridors and computerized traffic.
Too strong an emphasis of this kind, however, tends
to develop the gross and the eccentric. In any case, it
becomes boring. The reason that these qualities develop
is simply that, although each of us is unique, we are all,
for the most part, very much alike; the similarities are
greater than the differences. If pure confessional poetry
stresses the absolute and the unique, it can not, also,
avoid the fact of other minds, and if credit is not given
to the experience of others, the unwitting reproduction
of the experience of others tends to draw to itself,
rather than the meek tone of "I've been there too," the
sententious authoritarian trumpeting of "Listen to this
about me; it is vital!" and this is grossness.
128
The extreme avoidance of repetition, on the other
hand, leaves only the areas of oddness or uniqueness
which may or may not have beauty or significance and, in
fact, usually do not. And this is what is wrong with
eccentricity. The only escape is the one Eliot recom
mends— to come in out of the rain of one's own tears into
the shelter of other minds, accept a tradition, or a sym
bol that is believable, grow into it, make use of it.
Though poets have influenced Schwartz's poetic line or
his style, no tradition has received him and he sought
the safety of none. He understood the danger of his own
self-occupying, self-reviewing way and, perhaps, felt
that he could avoid grossness and eccentricity partly by
the delicacy of his uniqueness and partly by removing
altogether the possibility of "other minds"; this could be
accomplished by truly incorporating other minds, so that
the confessional poetry would not be merely repetitious
but would spring directly from a totality; the directness
is the danger, and calls for a process of constant incor
poration while, at the same time, the art for the most
effective presentation of the experience which must be
indirect is perforce also direct— in the absence of a
supporting tradition through which the artist could work.
■.... 129.
The only additional rationale for such activity is dis
trust, but then it well may be that distrust vectors the
activity. Here, perhaps, lies the beginning of
Schwartz1s psychological problems both as a man and as
an artist. Shenandoah is really one of the best balanced
works of this poet, in good part because of the leavening
nature of the two traditions that do manage to filter
into it— the blank verse and the Biblical phrasing.
Standing at an angle to the scene, Shenandoah reviews
his parents' marriage; the following quatrain sums up
much:
How can two egos live near by all their days
If love and love's unnatural forgiveness
Do not give to the body's selfishness
And the will's cruelty lifelong carte blanche? (p. 9)
And again, as in the short story, he is passing judgment
on his parents; the verse alternates between wryness and
despair. Elsie, the mother, tells her father-in-law,
Jacob Fish, that she would like to see the boy named
Jacob in his honor: "She thinks to please her husband
through his father. Do not suppose this flattery too
gross" (p. 11). But Jacob demurs, reminding her that in
this new America she has forgotten the customs of her
people. To name a child after a relative who is alive is
130
unlucky; it means Jacob Fish's death warrant. Elsie says
that she is surprised that he believes such superstitions.
Shenandoah comments, "How powerful the pastI O king of
kings ..." (p. 11). The past, again, is all-powerful
and determining. There is some altercation and Elsie
decides to change the name of the child, even though
the name has already been engraved on expensive announce
ments. She decides that "Jacob" is not a fine name any
how, and she wants an unusual name, "because he is going
to be an unusual boy" (p. 12). Elsie hands the child to
Shenandoah to hold, symbolically giving him for the
briefest instant before the past takes its firmest hold
on him, his freedom; he holds his life in his hands 1 The
spotlight falls on him and he addresses the child in a
firm, clear diction. I quote part of this moving speech:
Poor child, the center of this sinful earth,
How many world-wide powers surround you now . . .
I too am right to sympathize with you.
If I do not, who will? For I am bound
By the sick pity and the faithful love
The ego bears itself . . .
Ih the great city mid-winter holds,
The dirty rags of snow freeze at the curb,
Pneumonia sucks at breath, the turning globe
Brings to the bitter air and grey sky
The long Illness of time and history, (p. 12)
In many ways Schwartz's self-consciousness becomes
131
overdefensive and he himself anticipates what might be
said about a statement he makes, this giving him the
material for his second statement. The effect, as said
before, is of a bright self-consciousness which can be,
in the long run, alienating to the reader. When a person
gets too defensive, and speaks self-deprecatingly, the
auditor is handed the burden of expostulation, denying
the charge; this gets in the way of any possible sympathy
in the first place, and too much of it in writing, though
it stems from a defensiveness which engenders the need to
be omniscient, ends up with the reader irritatedly feel
ing that he is dealing with mere cleverness. More impor
tant, however, is the fact that it stops feeling. If
Schwartz had ended the statement in the center of the
fourth line quoted and merely said, "If.. I do not [sympa
thize with you], who will?" the overtones from Hillel,
"If I am not for myself, who is for me?" would have
helped the reader toward the profound and biblical emo
tion which should surround the ritual. The interruption
by, "for I am bound by the sick pity ..." etc. pre
serves Shenandoah's omniscience— a joy for Schwartz— at
the expense of true reader participation.
And the speech actually ends with an apology, to
132
my mind in very bad taste, taken from the epigraph to
"Gerontion" by T. S. Eliot
— Forgive my speech; I have nor youth nor age.
But as it were an after-dinner speech,
Speaking of both, with endless platitudes— (p. 13)
The double apology, Eliot's and then his own addition,
"with endless platitudes," seems nothing if not foolish.
It is, in a way, kicking the pail over for the sake of
self-protection of the crudest kind, and a speech full of
nobility and beauty ends up being mouthed by a clown. If
this was the poet's intention, one can not be criticized
for asking, "Why?"
A general discussion of desirable names ensues;
they decide to go through the social columns of the news
paper to see what powerful American names are mentioned.
Shenandoah observes wryly:
While they gaze at their glamorous ruling class
I must stand here, regardant at any angle,
I must lie there, quite helpless in my cradle,
As passive as a man who takes a haircut—
And yet, how many minds believe a man
Creates his life ex nihilo, and laugh
At the far influence of deities,
and stars— (p. 14)
"Regardant" is right, for it means "face in profile and
^The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: 1962),
p. 21.
133
looking backward"; this makes the identification complete
for, of course, it is only the grown shadow-self of
Shenandoah that can look backward, not the infant, or if
it is the infant— and one can maintain the thought momen
tarily— it strikes one with dismay and even terror, almost
a perspective, as Kenneth Burke might say, by incongruity.
During the course of the discussion, a Mr. Brewster
is mentioned who "has an estate in the Shenandoah Valley."
Elsie Fish cries, "Shenandoah! What a wonderful name:
Shenandoah Fish!" Then, a marvelous stage direction:
"The baby begins to howl." And quickly Shenandoah says,
Now it is done! quickly! I am undone:
This is the crucial crime, the accident
Which is more than an accident . . . (p. 15)
Here follows a disquisition in pentameter on the folklore
of naming, how primitive peoples are apt to call a child
by a demeaning adjective such as "Filth" or "Nothingness"
(The Jews avoid saying a child is beautiful) "in order to
outwit the evil powers" (p. 16), how a child is often
named after his father, "the wish is clear,/ All men would
live forever" (p. 16), how some are named after places,
"tacit admission of the part the milieu plays" (p. 16),
how the Jews were wise to call God "The Nameless," how it
is right that legal codes make name-change (identity-
134
change) difficult. There is more, but this is sufficient
to show the rich texture of the discussion which ends
with Shenandoah's notion of how one should be named, the
touching and plaintive, "Let each child choose his name
when he is old enough" (p. 16). He proposes it with
charming diffidence, for a change, making it a question,
inviting the reader's agreement rather than insisting on
it.
They discuss, they quarrel; his Uncle, Nathan, tries
to tell his father how unsuitable the name is for the
child ("Don't you see how pretentious the name is?" [p.
19]) and Shenandoah, watching the argument, philosophizes
on the fact that men who should be creating works of art,
making friends or love, instead prefer conflict ("Hate/
May seem the energy that drives the stars" [p. 20]). He
is fascinated by the multiplicity of causes that are at
work in the room to fashion the person they will ulti
mately produce;
— It is impossible to tell you now
How many world-wide causes work this room
To bring about the person of your name. (p. 20)
This does provide an opportunity to make a figure that
may help the analysis of Schwartz's habit of mind which I
have called "square" or "dated" or "at a distant focus."
Here he is overwhelmed by the multiplicity of causes.
This is certainly overwhelming as long as one makes the
tool of measurement "causes." It is then as hard as
spooning out the ocean. Similarly, Schwartz— this is in
his work only— seems to require a traditional order to
thinking and its presentation. As he grew older, he
tried to encompass many kinds of disorder with his funda
ment of discursive Western logic and also became over
whelmed with the complication of countless contradictions
at the heart of everything. If, in the first example
above, he would abandon the use of the idea of "causes"
altogether, he would not need to be overwhelmed. The
same thing holds true in the second case. This is not
meant to be a philosophical argument; this is merely
another attempt to arrive at a clear way to communicate
an insight into the nature of Schwartz's approach to
writing and thinking. Bergson said that if we classify
the motion of an arm rising, we get descriptions of mil
lions of changes— air motions, blood movements, force
exerted, epidermal reactions, muscular shifts, etc. But
if our description says simply: "The hand is lifted," we
avoid, assuming we wish to, the overwhelming details
which the classifying brings with it. This holds as well
for Schwartz when he struggles to fit occurrences today
into the foursquare net he fashioned from the great men
who, as Shenandoah says in this speech, ". . . will ob
sess this child when he can read" (p. 20). In short,
Schwartz has, it seems to me, created a closed system,
he has made himself a closed system; no matter how widely
he appears to open himself to new ideas, how voraciously
he seems to devour new cultural experiences, the matrix
is already formed and really not open to change. There
is in such a formation only the appearance of flexibil
ity: No matter how rich the content, the form remains
fixed. In spite of the tremendous intake, the balloon
only gets larger, but it always remains round. That is
the difficulty, I believe, at the core of Schwartz as a
thinker.
He continues Shenandoah's speech, telling the where
abouts of each of the great men at that very time "who
will obsess this child when he can read" (p. 20). He is
naming the coordinates of the matrix. The interesting
fact is not the list of men— they are the literary gi
ants of his time— but the fact that they help to consti
tute this preformed matrix which he brings to bear always
and at every point in his examination of life. One would
137
suppose that nothing is wrong with this; it seems to be a
solid identity-formation, culturally speaking, but it is
the very solidity that makes the Achilles hefel. The
earnest pressing of this point on all occasions prevents
the light touch— ever— and, more important, the special
creativity of the poet never escapes this direct pres
sure; it is never allowed to frisk about, to bring the
indirect into play, to bring fragmented and devious modes
into operation. All becomes closed and heavy-handed with
the result that Schwartz's writing often seems dated by
comparison with work that allows tangents. Shenandoah
names Joyce, Pound, Picasso, Rilke, Kafka, Perse, and
Mann, "Declaring the agony of modern life," and he closes
the speech.
The child will learn of life from these great men,
He will participate in their solitude,
And maybe in the end on such a night
As this, return to the starting point, his name,
Showing himself as such among his friends. (p. 21)
A great hope, and affecting, especially in view of his
later career disappointment. And this very hope, ironi
cally, is1stated solemnly, surely— preformed in a closed
system— part of the fault which prevented its realiza
tion.
Ironically, too, Shenandoah's father checks with his
138
attorney, a man for whom the father is a paying client,
one who is bullied into saying the name is a fine one.
So the child will pay for another flaw in his father's
character! Shenandoah underscores the circumcision rite
as appropriate
for with a wound
What better sign exists— the child is made
A Jew forever! . . .
— Chosen for wandering and alienation
In every kind of life, in every nation, (p. 27)
Schwartz moves from his own situation here just before
the curtain to the problems of his time from which one
finds refuge, perhaps, only in the "transient release
.. . in darkened theater's plays" (p. 28) .
The same year that Shenandoah appeared, 1941, the
New Directions Press published, in its annual compendium
4
of new writing, New Directions xn Prose and Poetry,
another verse play by Delmore Schwartz, "Paris and Helen."
So far as published work is concerned, this verse play is
the last of its genre Schwartz wrote. Schwartz's eight
een closely-penciled notebooks contain no other play or
part of a play. "Paris and Helen," then, ended
4
Norfolk, Conn., editor James Laughlin.
139
Schwartz's efforts as playwright.
Although it is cut out of the same prosodic cloth as
"Shenandoah," "Paris and Helen" is more closely related
to the poem "Coriolanus and His Mother." Its theme is a
dialectical continuation from this poem; if Coriolanus is
the hero, Paris is the anti-hero.^ In the poem, the
impasse of the uncompromising hero is resolved by death;
in the verse play, the crisis of the compromising hero is
ended by escape from death. Coriolanus rejects the flesh
in favor of the image; Paris rejects the image of the
hero in favor of the flesh. It is possible to see this
as a further step in the narcissist's progress, the poet
making a gesture of maturity, seeming to open somewhat,to
surrender a little to the invasion of the unpredictable,
uncontrollable aspect of reality. At the same time,
Schwartz has an involvement with being looked at, the
relationship between the actor and the audience; a natural
result of this preoccupation, combined with his struggle
5Here the use of "anti-hero" is literal. It does
not carry the full meaning as it is used in contemporary
criticism. The anti-hero, for instance, of "Notes from
the Underground" is withdrawn, miserable, and rejecting.
Paris is too sociable, satisfied, and accepting to warrant
a label with the same meaning, yet the dialectic of
Schwartz's two works demands this precise term, but in
its stark and literal meaning.
X40
to bridge the real and the ideal, is his identification
of the clumsy, accidental, wanton reality with the crude
figures of popular entertainment. Thus, "Paris and Helen"
is subtitled "an entertainment," and it is inscribed "to
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer." This looks backward to . .
Chaplin and his orphan sister"6 and forward to his fly
leaf comment in Vaudeville for a Princess— "Suggested by
Princess Elizabeth's Admiration for Danny Kaye."
It is as if the poet, perpetually attracted to the
difference and distance between the real and the ideal,
persists in one enactment after the other of reactions,
rituals, and resolutions involving this problem. The
enactment must include Schwartz himself or his persona
(in "Paris and Helen" he is, of course, the dramatist),
the actors, and at least references to the audience if
not, as in "Coriolanus and His Mother," the audience
itself, and all of this formed into the verse play as
exorcism, talisman, strategy.
Nevertheless the Coriolanus image stubbornly pre
vails; this is clear in the sarcasm and disdain with
which the prospect of writing a "popular" piece is
6In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, p. 104.
141 ;
considered at the beginning of the play in the conversa
tion of the producer and the dramatist:
But how can I compete with the whores of the mind,
So dominant upon the Great White Way,
Sleeping with all the ticket agencies? (p. 196)
Even though the dramatist says wryly, "0, I would write
one, if I could1" (p. 196), later in the play he cries
longingly,
. . . all of us would be the noble Hector
If we but could? Paris himself would rather
Be like the noble Hector, if he but could 1
The contemptuous capitalization of "The Great White Way"
is obvious, and it is clear that Hector is the same
heroic cast as Coriolanus. But above and beyond the
matter of prevailing inclination are the strangulated
italics in which the "if I could" in each case is printed,
a truculant but sad obeisance to limitation and, ulti
mately, determinism.
The play presents the intervention of the Goddess,
Venus, into the Helen-Paris-Menelaus triangle at the
point where Paris must face Menelaus in combat before the
walls of Troy. The relationship of these characters and
the kind of sex which intrudes are suggested by
Schwartz's casting of the characters— Paris to be played
by Robert Montgomery, Helen by Madaleine Carroll, Hector
142.
by Spencer Tracy, and Venus alternately by Greta Garbo,
Myrna Loy, Hedy Lamarr, and Dame Mae Whitty. The Pro
ducer challenges the Dramatist in the first scene to write
a popular success, insisting that regardless of the
Dramatist's high standards, he is "flesh and blood like
the rest of us" (p. 195). The Dramatist's mind goes back
in history, searching the past for a story, lights on
Homeric Troy, "The very early morning of Western culture"
(p. 197). He will be able to use the Trojan story because
it will arouse the interest of everyone since "sexual
congress is the story's nub" (p. 197). At this point the
Producer interrupts:
Is all this platitude quite necessary?
The audience is waiting for the play—
(Impatient claps from the audience.) (p. 198)
The conversation is transpiring before the curtain and the
interruption brings an audience into the theater, "alien
ating" the reader in the sense that Brecht used the word.
Another level of looking has been added and the interrup
tion takes one back to this device as it is used in
"Coriolanus and His Mother," where the great culture
heroes of the past interrupt the play with comments and
are, in turn, interrupted by the author who steps forward
before the curtain. No doubt riches accrue through depth
■ ..........143
on depth but attention should be given to the fact that
this compulsive addition of viewers who are viewed, and
viewers who are viewing the viewers viewing, etc., points
up the sophisticated self-consciousness of an ultimately
defensive playwright and makes, therefore, an important
part of the theme the passivity of the voyeur. The scene
moves on to the old men on the walls of Troy; they gossip
about the beauty of Helen and the confrontation of Hector
and Paris after Paris's shameful exit which ended his
contest with Menelaus. Again the Dramatist interrupts,
comments on their comments. Again the matter of looking
is brought up:
Spectators, tourists, paid admissions,
These old men have no more to do, but look . . .
And yet they register the action's fullness—
Because they are somwhat apart from it—
Because they're old, because the past knows more—
(p. 200)
The old men decide that regardless of her beauty, it
would be better if she went back to Greece so that war
might be avoided. The Dramatist ends the scene quoting
an "expatriot American" who "wrote so well/ Putting old
Greek into modern English" (p. 204) , and the final re
mark of the dramatist is, "How the past/ Once in a poem,
has more lives than a cat!" (p. 204). Both the old men
............ 144.
and the Trojan scene represent the past with its power
that reaches through to the present in which the Drama
tist is preparing his play.
Scene two reveals the old men describing the fight
between Menelaus and Paris. A cloud of dust descends
over Paris at the critical moment. He is protected and
removed, leaving a raging and frustrated Menelaus on the
field. The curtain descends and the Dramatist appears to
explain that this occurrence is "no sudden accident, mere
cloud of dust" but "It is divinity itself which inter
feres" (p. 208). Venus has given Paris protection because
he once chose her as prettier than Juno or Diana. In
short, Paris casts his lot with Love, and it is Love
which constructs his survival. The Dramatist takes occa
sion to excuse his presence since it
embellishes the whole
With the rich views of a self-conscious mind, (p. 208)
This is the greatest virtue of all art
That it possesses Life and yet transcends it— (p. 209)
This is the fundamental statement in the scene; it does
not pertain to the action of the play; it is concerned
neither with the conflict nor the characters, but with
the Dramatist, and it places him comfortably on top of it
all, in control where safety lies and where, unlike life,
145
everything is arrangeable and predictable. The paradox
lies in the fact that in the very act of presenting a
seeming confession of submissiveness and acceptance of
life— identification with the anti-hero— Schwartz arro
gates to himself powers which make this impossible and
which would seem to save him from the necessity of this
identification. One is reminded of the ending of an
earlier poem of his, "For the One Who Would Take Man's
Life in His Hands":
What do all examples show?
What can any actor know?
The contradiction in every act,
The infinite task of the human heart.^
The anti-hero, like Paris, wins by losing; Schwartz, the
Dramatist, loses by winning.
The third scene demonstrates Paris1 victory and
analyzes its nature. The victory is survival, the means
is Venus through Helen, the mode an anti-heroic abandon
ment of the battlefield for the bedroom. At the begin
ning of the scene Paris is returned to Helen safe and
shamed; Helen upbraids him; he tells her not to be a
child, points out that the next time he might win just
as today belonged to Menelaus:
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, p. 120.
146
For I have some divinities on my side, and it
is all a matter of luck, or divinity, or something
which has very little to do with one's character or
effort. You ought to know that, you who were given
your beauty effortlessly, and spontaneously. (p. 211)
She tells him he speaks like a coward. He answers that
he speaks like a "sensible, intelligent man" (p. 211),
and right here is breached the value structure supporting
the heroic. "A matter of luck, or divinity, or some
thing . . ." implies an absence of the ordered cosmic
framework on which values such as the heroic depend.
The "divinity" mentioned has nothing to do with the dis
tant, thunderous Zeus, but with the casual, the feminine
(Venus), the whimsical, and the purchasable. It is a
tangential view, wry, accepting, but one that insists,
nevertheless, on one condition— "opting out" of the es
tablished ideal in favor of the immediately real. A man
set against an image can cut a sorry figure, indeed, but
it is the man who breathes and loves; breath is for the
man, but love is always for another, and thus, the other,
in sanity, must plump for the man rather than the image.
Looking, inversely, is again involved for now Paris is
unveiled for all to see, for Helen to see. Rid once and
for all of the armor of image and ideal, this free man,
the anti-hero, desires as he never desired before, and
147
tells Helen so. The naked truth desires and is desir
able; Helen is equally aroused. The Dramatist holds up
the action and underscores the moment,
0 what insight this moment holds, that now
Desire should be greatest,
now in the aftermath
Of worst defeat, immense humiliation: (p. 212)
He marvels at the triumph of Paris, who is "the average
sensual man/ One so much so he is a wonder at it" (p.
213). He points out that this is the way things are,
shows the similarity to the tremendous success enjoyed in
America by the ignorant man largely because "He did not
know or think of better things" (p. 213). And he ends
this speech sardonically trapping the reader into an
identification with Paris as he addresses the audience
in the play:
Such is the way of the world, my dears,
Passive and gazing, in the audience— (p. 213)
There is a cry behind the curtain which rises to show
that Paris' brother, Hector, has entered the bedroom,
bent on murder. Paris defends himself with argument,
finally telling Hector that his warrior ideal is used by
the people to maintain their own prosperity, to back up
"usurpations of this city on the whole countryside"
(p. 215); he underlines, "That is all it is." Nothing
avails, so that Paris, in desperation tries to show Hector
the full-bodied and naked truth of his motivation for
survival— the unveiled Helen in her beauty. Hector is
shaken by this argument, but feels contempt for Paris.
Nothing concrete can change his mind and, mechanically,
he proceeds to the murder of his brother. From Hector's
point of view, Paris is contemptible, a coward, a shirker
of responsibility, almost a degenerate. Again the God
dess of Love intervenes; Venus warns Hector, "This man is
mine, Hector. He shall not die" (p. 216). This "average
sensual man" is to be saved! He thanks Venus, turns
immediately to Helen and says, "... Do not weep. This
is Life. This is how Life is." He is not speaking of
abstractions or of Goddesses, but simply of the contin
gent nature of life— that whatever characteristic he
happens to have happened to save him. There is the
implication that what saves Paris saves the average man,
the viewer, the anti-hero whenever he is saved.
At curtain the Dramatist, who has made a great show
of revealing the play within the play and spectator
watching spectator, peeks behind the curtain to watch.
Paris and Helen are making love and he describes it,
commenting at the same time on the fact that they are
149
being looked at and that he is looking.
Voyeur! Voyeur! Voyeur! all men are but
Voyeurs! you in the audience most of all.
The Dramatist— no more than Schwartz— can not resist a
pun, so he adds,
here have we seen tonight
A grievous fight in which divinity
Hits heroism, as you saw, below the belt. (p. 214)
And, in the closing remarks, one can not escape, either,
the powerful irony of
Is it not right
And just that strong divinity
Should intervene so much in human life? (p. 214)
in which chance is characterized as sacred or divinity
characterized as accident.
It is not to the point, here, to evaluate "Paris and
Helen" as a play, though it is difficult to imagine it
playing well. It seems too synoptic, too dense, even for
a one-act closet drama. On the other hand, it is not
successful as a poem since the texture is too variegated—
the use of prose, of poetry, of pun, and characterization
all in a few short pages. As the presentation of an
insight into human nature, it is certainly concise, but
quality of the poetic line is the only excuse for density,
and, in "Paris and Helen," even what seems dense at
150
first, proves in many cases, merely to be indirect, far
fetched, or elliptical on close inspection. There is,
however, a success here on another level. This little
play is a very modern reply to Jean Giradoux, who explores
g
the same general area in Tiger at the Gates. Almost
in the Shavian tradition, Schwartz proffers common sense
and the desire to love as opponents of Giradoux's dramatic
symbol of the inevitability of war. Both plays are
involved with a sense of the absurd— Giradoux's with a
cynical acceptance and Schwartz's with a more positive
resolution.
8
Trans. Christopher Fry (New Yorks 1955)
CHAPTER III
GENESIS
Genesis,1 Schwartz's third book of poetry, is an
autobiography through the poet's fourth grade in school,
and the title should have, for those familiar with his
earlier work, a certain poignancy. In this book Schwartz
tells of his origin in some detail; but it is also an
account of the genesis of his psychological difficulties
and there is little doubt that, considering the poet's
interest in Freudian theory, his inescapable interest in
and need for modern psychiatric therapy, and his penchant
for puns, that he meant the title to have at least these
two meanings. Deep traumas occur early in life, the
doctors say. In Genesis it is this period alone which is
treated in some detail.
But the book also contains reiterations of his basic
^New York, 1943.
151
themes, all his attitudes and problems as a grown man;
this material is usually couched in verse while the
autobiography more often than not is rendered in prose.
This is not a hard-and-fast rule but Schwartz departs
from it only infrequently. The prose!.and verse sections
flow on from one another with no marked break, and the
book is thus one long single work. There are no chapters
the only divisions are made by page endings, stanza
breaks in the verse areas, and short, usually single
sentence, paragraphs in prose.
Although Schwartz makes the statement in a note to
the reader in the beginning of the book that "This is the
first book of a work which is almost finished" (p. vii),
nothing further of this nature was published. Several
surmises are possible: that this book says all he had to
say on the subject; that he had more to say, but said it
in his short stories; or that he was disappointed in the
critical reception of the book and so never continued
with it. But part of Schwartz's later illness expressed
itself in an extraordinary degree of reticence about the
facts of his adult life. It is pardonable to suggest
that he was incapable of presenting it as directly as he
did his childhood and background. Even about Genesis he
153
protests in his introduction that "it is an obvious
stupidity and misuse to take any sentence as the truth
about any particular human being" (p. ix).
The fact remains that the biographical detail in
Genesis recounts the background and early experiences of
Delmore Schwartz. Since this is the case, Genesis gains
in significance when some knowledge of Schwartz's later
life is available. And even more important than the
work, marriage, and publication data is the picture of
Schwartz as a personality. It is the formation of this
personality which the story line of Genesis describes
while the ideas and attitudes fully matured are presented
through the poetic commentary. The arrangement of this
work has caused it to be referred to by one critic as a
rather blasphemous satire on the Bible; the parallel with
the Book of Genesis is certainly clear, together with the
Biblical rhythm of the prose and of some of the verse.
But one can, just as well, see a parallel between this
structure and the Torah, which is composed of two main
sections, the text and the commentary. In Genesis the
text is the prose story and the verse is the commentary.
By such a comparison or association, the origin of the
inescapably satirical note of the mock-heroic is clearly
154
seen. Later, as a kind of post-hypnotic jolt, comes the
realization of the degree of bitterness in a man who—
with such richness and love— mocks the reader and mocks
himself as well.
Genesis opens with a "chorus of the dead," not so
named by the poet but composed of the same ghosts of
culture heroes who attended the play in "Coriolanus and
His Mother"; they wait upon and witness the sleep and
awakening in the morning of Hershey Green. The time is
around 1930, the young man in his late twenties. Hershey,
with their encouragement, begins, as if on the psycho
analyst's couch, to tell them his story. Knowing
Schwartz's interest in the power of the past, one is not
surprised to find that the story begins with Hershey's
grandfather, whom he had never seen, in Russia during the
final days of the Tsarist regime. Since the time, the
nationality, the plot development, and even the outr£
quality of both names, "Hershey Green" and "Delmore
Schwartz," all bear out the classification of this work
as autobiography, one exceeds no limits of conjecture in
making such an assumption and in shifting back and forth
from the characters and action of the plot to the people
and happenings in the real life story of Delmore Schwartz.
155
Such shifting is not only natural but helpful.
The story begins with the adventures of Hershey
Green's father and his grandfather on the maternal side
in their respective efforts to get to America. Jack
Green, his father, was assisted by his older brother, who
had arrived in America first. Ben Newman, the man who
ultimately became Jack Green's father-in-law had, it
appeared, deserted his wife and his own brother-in-law—
whose money he took— had used the money to come to Amer
ica and, finally, had paid off his brother-in-law and
sent for his wife and family. Jack Green is described
as a passionate, stubborn, self-centered man, and so he
was if he is to be taken as the projection of Harry
Schwartz, Delmore Schwartz's father. And Eva Green, n£e
Newman, was the tactless, unhappy woman who married Harry
Schwartz and bore him two sons, Delmore and Kenneth.
At the point where Eva Green has been married a year
and where Jack Green has already discovered that as far
as he is concerned the marriage is a mistake, the reader
has reached page 46. The text has not been all plot; the
plot is confined to the prose sections of single-sentence
paragraphs; it moves forward smoothly with a rhythm and a
vitality very much like the stories of Sholom Aleichem.
156
A semipoetic and synoptic effect is achieved reminiscent
also of the parable; this is achieved partly by the fact
that the paragraphs are ended even when the sentence is
not; it simply continues in the next paragraph, which is
naturally indented and starts with a capital. One would
expect this to give it a quality similar to prose poetry
but this is not the case. Here is an example of the un
finished sentence at the end of a line:
And the idea grew in Noah's being, the idea sprang
to the conscious mind, many a care and means
Seemed to suggest itself. The soldiers by a fast-
flowing river one morning camped and went bathing.
Noah undressed with the rest and disposed his
uniform where it would be discovered, (p. 9)
These prose passages are interspersed with sections
of the blank verse commentary; the effort of the verse is
to establish the self-consciousness of the poet in Amer
ica. But it is not only the concrete America of buildings
and space but a point in time, culturally speaking.
Schwartz seems, through his personae, the ghosts who make
up this chorus of commentators, to be attempting to fix
the precise outlines of his individuality. He is asking,
in effect, what is the individual, what am I? The reply
is in the poetry. The individual is in the world and the
world "is everything that is the case." One, according
157
to Schwartz (implicitly) and to Heidegger before him,
does not exist without the other. Therefore, the prov
ince of the poetry consists of every relationship— social,
philosophical, religious, and physical— of which the poet
at the given point in time is capable. And the given
point is, for the poet, now and America.
The American Dream is for Americans, at the very
least for second generation Americans. For the emigrant,
for Ben Newman and Jack Green, there is the promise which
is the precursor of the Dream.
Would you like to start from the womb again?
Here you can leave the womb a second time!
0 here the world and Life begin afresh— " (p. 19)
and
The old dream of America springs up,
Springs like a boxer's am, blocking a blow, (p. 27)
The personalities of Jack Green and his brother,
Albert, are described in the verse,
— Albert the family man, Jack passionate,
Passionate for himself and appetites— " (p. 36)
Albert awakens one night and sees his brother's large
strong frame stretched in sleep; immediately he resolves
to urge Jack to be a policeman:
He knows by now how the world moves, he knows
Many manoeuvres of Realpolitik,
He wakes his brother up to be a cop! (p. 36)
158
It does not take long for the young men to become Amer
icans! But Jack begins to sell insurance, makes many
friends whom he loses as soon as they discover that they
were charmed only to the point of purchase; they were
used! Jack's nature is revealed, thus, not only by the
explicit comment and analysis but by episodes and images.
Jack is restless, wishes to "settle down," begins to
court Eva. He is welcomed by Eva but not by old Ben
Newman, who senses the restlessness in his future son-in-
law. The action is surrounded in the verse by "signs of
the times"
as if the pair
Walked hand-in-hand upon a roof-top brink
Fifty-five floors above the city street,
As in the comedies of Harold Lloyd— (p. 47)
Not only movie stars, but cartoon characters— Mutt and
Jeff, the Katzenjammer Kids— and popular legends like
Santa Claus, all the paraphernalia of the popular Ameri
can scene are mentioned, made use of by the poet in
building the background from the stage on which his
little ego will soon strut. Jack Green goes into the
real estate business, making money from the hope of other
recent arrivals from Europe. "He was surely a man who
was going to be rich!" (p. 53). Schwartz's recurrent
159
theme involving his complex concern with choice is inter
polated here for the first time in Genesis. It is in
reference to the business moves made by Jack Green, who
has been shown to be the kind of man who will "... take
his life in his hands"
I see now how Jack Green's life by his will
Was made, yet, of necessity,
By the great causes made essentially:
Europe, America, Capitalismus, (p. 53)
and
— Walking involves the ground as well as legs!
(p. 53)
And here is interposed one of Schwartz's long philosoph
ical passages which do impede the action but which are
integral to the poetry. In this passage he is clear and
explicit on the subjects of belief, determinism, signif
icance, the hereafter. The hope and enthusiasm of youth
still light up his doubts. It is back to the heights of
this ebullience that his later, forced affirmations seek
to take him. At this point nothing is forced; the ex
citement explodes of its own volition, as it were. For
all the emotion, it is still a statement of complex and
2
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (Norfolk, Va.,
1938) , p. 119.
160
balanced doubts.
And at the close of it, he falls back, nevertheless,
on the only salvation he can justly rely upon; at least
he can have the joy of knowing! When, at a later date,
this is finally destroyed, he encounters a despair that
is only masked momentarily by his affirmations.
Perhaps the sum alone decides the life,
And all the souls that are perhaps are spun
Just like the roulette wheel or turning globe
Under Time's utter fire and dazzling oars,
— perhaps the all decides and nothing less,
The all immensely coiled and soiled. Perhaps
The pure event leaps from the infinite cave,
And if I say this from death's worst despair,
I know that maybe God has purposes
Stranger than any dream and wholly just,
But now in ignorant death this is a thought
My mind can utter but cannot believe,
— Perhaps Eternity will light up all,
Even the ignorance in which I grieve
— It is impossible to know at all
Until one knows causes and principles:
O friends! this is the only happiness!
Lo, in this Switzerland God has made clear
Peaks, heights, and snows! how wonderful
Is Life, 0 wonderful beyond belief,
Hope, and desire, on Reason's far-off heights!
— Ice cream and other sweets have gone away,
All dreams are rags, all hopes have died. Only
To see the causes which debauched our lives
In this eternity's cold cloudy light
Remains to us: let's make the most of it! . . . (pp.
54-55)
The cold conclusions set off the center of vitality,
happiness, enthusiasm, warmth as night black borders on a
161
party invitation. Schwartz is young but his mind is
older. The emotion seems possible because there is hoper
and hope is possible because of his youth. This sounds
something like the strong affirmations of his later
poetry, but the balance between hope, emotion, and reason
is different and this difference is what creates the
quality of desperation in the later work. The deep-dyed
final despair which results in the feeling of a yea-saying
that is forced and in one sense, therefore, meretricious
did not exist until later! What this amounts to is that
the later affirmations with their hysterical exultance
have a different purpose from that of the earlier state
ments; they are masks and buttresses, failing as they are
used and collapsing as they are erected. The emotion in
this last quotation is of another simpler order; though
it is already inappropriate to the message of the mind
around which it curls— inappropriate in the sense of the
stock responses which such insights usually call forth—
it is appropriate in that, at least, it is the exuberance
of early vitality. The attitude in these lines is only
one key lower than Hardy's when he ends his poem, "I
should go with him in the gloom/ Hoping it might be
The marriage between Jack and Eva Green limps along
with Eva growing less secure each day; she "had been told
that a child kept a man at home" (p. 65). Her doctor
explains that she will need surgery to make her amenable
to impregnation. She does not dare ask her husband, who
is always on the verge of leaving her. She recalls that
when she was in Europe on the trip she made with Jack,
her rich uncle had given her a French bond as a going-
away present. This she sells to pay the surgeon. A
short time afterward she becomes pregnant with her son,
Hershey. Schwartz makes much of this; it becomes more
than a reminiscence because it calls to mind one of his
major concerns, a theme never long unmentioned in one way
or another in his verse. The first reference to the bond
is in the prose, and it immediately conveys Schwartz's
emphasis on the power of the past, the power of chance,
the determined present, the limits on choice.
The prosperity of Eastern European capitalism sent
in the French bond west. It went through Paris, the
capital of Western culture,
3
Thomas Hardy, "The Oxen," in Modern Verse, ed.
Oscar Williams (New York, 1967).
163
And entered her marriage and entered her womb.
(p. 65)
Again the self-consciousness; Schwartz is aware that this
degree of interest in such a minor matter is unusual; he
knows his obsessions.
The sleepless boy has what an oblique mind,
Thus to have emphasized a minor nut
The French bond borne from Bucharest to Brest
And overseas, over Atlantic rides
— Surely he might have been born otherwise,
And what has that to do with what he is? (p. 66)
What has it to do with what he is, indeed! The man who
laid desperate claim to his need for freedom as a defense
against the hostile world spent a lifetime of poetry
tracking down the accidents that formed his genesis.
Forgive the accident of accidents
Which made you; like the hare-lipped girl,
Forgive yourself, and like the turning world
Forgive strange God, maker of Heaven and Earth,
Who made the spring and fall with a slight tilt
(p. 67)
Again the god of accident is evoked; the baby is to
be named, "announcing the unique inimitable psyche" (p.
69). The act of naming here as in Schwartz's play
Shenandoah sets the child apart, emphasizes for his life
his irreducible individuality. Here, for Schwartz, the
drama begins and ends— in the apparent contradiction or
conflict between the freedom of will which is the prerog
ative of idiosyncrasy, and the power of circumstance.
164
Eva adored a friend's child, thought him delightful when
he smiled and burbled over a piece of Hershey candy; she
vowed that she would name her child Hershey; for "looking
at him, she saw the image of what she wanted her child
to be" (p. 69). And so, deciding in a moment, Baby Green
was named HersheyI The third element stressed by the act
is the double absurdity— that the significant act of
naming should devolve from whim, and an especially silly
whim, at that, and that the name decided upon should carry
ah equally demeaning and silly connotation.
The sound which means the ego is alone,
The bass of harbor boats, alone, alone!
The pathos of departure's fogbound moan,
The self's self-exile from the womb and home—
The basis of the art of poetry,
The hard identity felt in the bone— (p. 70)
Not as much is made of the matter here as in Shenandoah,
where the naming for which the Jewish religion dictates a
special seriousness and a special ritual becomes the core
of the play. Where Shenandoah achieves some fine poetry
with moments of exaltation as well as irony, the poetic
comment in Genesis falls far short, is, in spots, flat
prose, "The basis of the art of poetry," or stresses the
lugubrious, a step below the absurd, and the tone is a
shrill jeer.
165
Pigeons pass overhead, and one lets go
— The one man wet amid the 70,000
Cries out. Here are 70,000 faces.
Why did that pigeon have to pick on me?
— The joke of individuality1 (p. 70)
or a forced and fake sublimity
— Let us look down from heights, from Everest—
Or from a star, or from Eternity,
O from Eternity, that is, from Death: (p. 71)
And, perhaps appropriately, the next episode is the
death of Hershey's young uncle, much beloved by Eva. The
poetry describes the reaction of Eva, who eyes her child
with fear, each moment, that he, too, might sneeze, catch
a cold and die the way his uncle died, and the reaction
of Jack Green, who
thinks, not me, not me,
him, but
Not me! And yet who knows who will be next?
He says to himself, horrified at heart,
facing the first abyss— (p. 74)
Grubbing unselectively in the cumulus of one's past
requires some explanation, especially when it is done
publicly and presumably in poetry! One wonders, fairly
often, what excuse this poet could give himself for
including so much detail in Genesis, what motivation
beyond mere compulsion could account for the plethora of
incident and comment, and here in the comment on his
166
uncle's death Schwartz offers a reason or an excuse. It
is needed because the quality of the verse in Genesis is
particularly uneven, and the fault may lie in its unse-
lective quantity. And so, Schwartz writes,
This New York boy tells us a piteous story,
I hear tears in his voice and I hear fear,
— Calm, calm, poor boy, brimming and obsessed,
Tais-toi,
Pauvre enfant1 endure your past as such:
No one, not God himself, can learn too much!
(p. 75)
Hershey's first impressive piece of learning in
volved his position as the center of his mother's love
and care. The day after his younger brother's birth
Hershey is kept out of his mother's room— something new,
the deepest deprivation that no one outgrows. "And thus,
faced with this problem, difficulty and pain, the small
mind became creative" (p. 83). This is reference to an
unscientific attitude toward creativity which has ancient
antecedents in critical history— that suffering creates
art. It may be true that in the discipline there is a
curtailing when one wishes to spread and a spreading when
one wishes to draw in, which may be the cause of or a
part of suffering. And, of course, art requires disci
pline. But it is not necessarily reversible— that disci
pline or suffering produces art. The "problem, difficulty
' 167
* ■ ^
and pain" Schwartz mentions may produce actions without
strategy (bawling) or feelings (dismay) or actions with
strategy such as those entered upon by the wily child who
contrives to be taken to the bathroom which, since it is
on the other side of his mother's room, naturally allows
him to see her. Hershey was creative about the strategy;
he need not have been; someone else might not have been.
If this is the case, then the springs of creativity do
not necessarily find their source in suffering. Eva
realizes Hershey's cleverness and he is hugged and kissed.
But the lesson here for Hershey is not only the joy of
cleverness. He has learned to be
. . . alarmed and appalled at the precarious perch
of the ego,
And the desperate struggle! (p. 84)
The nature of his parents is illustrated next in a
passage devoted to the naming of Hershey's brother, Roger.
Some years before Roger's birth, Jack Green had had an
affair with the wife of a streetcar conductor who had a
son, Roger; it was the fact of this son that prevailed
on her husband to take her back after he learned about
the affair from her; she wanted to leave him but Jack
Green rejected her and she went back to her husband.
Jack had told Eva about this, and the name "Roger"
~#r>
168
remained with her associated with her husband's guilt.
Without recalling this association, she decided to name
her own second born, "Roger." The poetic comment on this
is a good example of Schwartz's blank verse; it is like a
rickety sled home-made out of modern Tinker-Toy and
Erector set parts, cluttered with conceits in the style
and analysis in the content, and so burdened with self-
conscious colloquialisms (yet both phrase and idea wrapped
in timeless pontification) that one wonders what dis
turbing and not particularly desirable gift this clumsy
Santa will drop off next. It is, nevertheless, persist
ent and effective.
May I psychologize? and thus extend
— With such a light— all that the brimming boy
Already knows, and mourns? Jack tells his wife,
Smug and self-satisfied, of an amour
Ten years ago: pleased with himself, in mind
Too self-pleased, thinking of it, to conceive
How such a cause must seem to his wife's mind,
To her mind most of all. There it abides
With monumental place because it fits
What interests her the most, Jack's character:
Cut in her mind as on the continent
of North America a glacial age!
Is this comparison extreme? Behold,
She names her second son her husband's guilt,
As self-absorbed, as ignorant as he
— Each to his blindness through Eternity!
Such egoists are so preoccupied
With their own minds, they lack imagination
Of what their pride in cleverness must seem
To someone walking in another dream!
169
Hot tears are sliding down the poor boy's face.
He sees in all of this identities
— He would divorce himself from both of them,
And from himself, a vain and insane hope—
(pp. 86-87)
Compare this verse with that of Edwin Arlington Robinson,
another modern poet, albeit a generation and a half
before Schwartz. Compare it but not for grading, simply
for illumination.
"I have no more a child,"
He thought, "and what she is I do not know.
It may be fancy and fantastic youth
That ails her now; it may be the sick touch
Of prophecy concealing disillusion.
If there were not interwoven so much power
And poise of sense with all her seeming folly,
I might assume a concord with her faith
As that of one elected soon to die.4
Both poets are using the line to carry an amount of
psychological analysis— Schwartz to show how irrevocably
his self-centered parents are separated from each other,
neither able to understand the other, and Robinson to
show the separation of father from daughter where even
love supplies no answers and King Howel is left only with
conjecture. Schwartz's verse is cacophanous, if not
dissonant; one is immediately impressed with the smooth
4Selection from "Tristram," in Twentieth Century
American Writing, ed. William T. Stafford (New York,
1965), pp. 41-42; lines 190-199.
motion of Robinson's. This blank verse— to complement
the figure above— would seem like a slick sled dipping
down a gentle incline with packages of alliteration and
understatement wrapped in a high-toned and removed
decorum. The strongest contrast lies in the tone;
Robinson's is meditative and measured; Schwartz's is
overemphatic, almost hysterical. It is as if Robinson's
persona is ruminating while Schwartz's is shouting.
There is a timelessness about the Robinson diction; the
phrasing seems pared down; the texture of modern things
whittled off it so that a good part of "Tristram," really,
could have been written— if it were not for some of the
close psychological analysis— in another time. Schwartz
shows no regard for the smooth flow, the inhibition, the
formal diction; his line contains diverse materials of
the times, some pertinent, others peripheral to his imme
diate theme. It turns back on itself sometimes more com
plicated than complex, but usually richer for the ter
giversations. It may have a fundamental theme but several
themes are kept going at the same time, some at times in
opposition (thesis, antithesis) to each other. It does
not hesitate to move from the formal to the colloquial or
the vulgate, from the significant to the trivial.
171
At all times one is conscious of a world view in
process of being manufactured. Robinson writes from
within the focus and strength of an established world
view and thus gives the effect of a finished product.
Contrast on the level of content nets similar conclu
sions. Where Schwartz has the burden or advantage of
developed Freudian psychology, Robinson published "Tris
tram" in 1927, when these insights were just beginning to
be available to Americans.
The fact remains, though, that Schwartz's blank
verse— perhaps partly because it is so wide open to the
invasion of flat realism— is much closer to prose than
Robinson's, which falls into dullness where Schwartz's
falls into flatness. There's little doubt that Robin
son's work is more meticulous while Schwartz's admits a
richer texture. It is not hard to pinpoint the results
of Schwartz's willingness to put anything or everything
into his line. For instance, just following this passage
he writes, "During these years, when the fog of infancy,
blooming and booming, slowly lifted." "Booming" is per-
missable since this brings in the comparison of ships'
horns booming in the harbor fog with the noises and
voices all around the child. (The real association,
172
here, however, comes from James' "buzzing, booming con
fusion.") But fog does not "bloom" and the fog Schwartz
is describing is lifting, which means it is diminishing
which, logically, is the opposite of "blooming." So very
often this conflict of meaning jams up the line and
grinds it to a halt!
The next section of poetic comment anticipates the
attempt to merge self with Nature which recurs as a sig
nificant mode in Schwartz's last poems. Here, in Genesis,
more than a decade earlier, Schwartz is beginning to use
the incantatory phrasing so characteristic of his last
poems. He writes about the effect of the snowfall, the
joy it gives little Hershey,
A game which makes activity pure joy,
Being itself Being itself, and more
Than striving for the absent future end— (p. 91)
He seeks to make the identification in an intuited now,
the resolution, then, of so much through the mode of
mysticism. Here, however, the incantatory repetition
defeats itself by the trick of using the verb "being" at
the start of the line, thus giving it a spurious capital
letter compared to the capitalization of the second
"Being." One's attention is attracted to the clever play
and distracted from the hypnotic effect that can be
173
developed by such repetition.
Again and again the theme returns to an apology or
an explanation for delving into the detail of the past.
This time the poet sketches in the images through which
the modern American seeks his own significance. He
writes first, "(Europe the greatest thing in North Amer
ica!" (p. 96). And then,
Lincoln is on a penny in the mind
And Jeeves and Cinderella show the boat
We all are in, the rotten ship of state!
Chaplin shuffles and tips his hat! Then runs!
John Bull and Uncle Sam are not cartoons
But heavy actual bullies boxing through us!
They move through all of us, like summer fine:
Keep thinking all the time, 0 New York boy!
Go back,
In each, all natural being once more lives!
(p. 97)
In all of the passages with this theme, the implica
tion— when it is not stated outright— is that freedom,
which seems to be denied to all, may, just may, be
achieved by going back, unravelling the threads, learning
each link in a chain of cause and effect. Physicists,
mathematicians cast probabilities in the twentieth cen
tury; with the philosophers they weaken the acceptance of
the old notions of cause and effect. But the temptation
to believe that accident is only accident because the
174
variables are too many for unravelling has been given a
false authority by a carry-over from psychology which has
shown in some areas that there are no accidents. In this
passage Schwartz clings to the notion and the attendant
ambivalence that had already been expressed many times,
one instance being Stephen Crane's "The Blue Hotel."
He goes on to give an example of accident and absurdity—
Verdi bending down to reach a collar button under the
bed, suffering death from apoplexy. The natural corol
lary is to exalt memory, "The memory alone can hold the
self!" (p. 98). And a little farther on, "O seek, he
means, the depths of the Past from which/ The soul's
moves rise as grasses from the earth— " (p. 99).
A few lines before this passage is a statement that
takes the reader even further back to an earlier verse.
In this later line on page 99 he makes his first thor
oughly explicit statement about Hershey's emotional dis
turbance: "In the middle of everything, sick boy," the
speaker addresses Hershey. "Sick boyi" the poet writes
and one may properly assume he speaks to himself. On
page 87 occur these lines,
Hot tears are sliding down the poor boy's face,
He sees in all of this identities
— He would divorce himself from both of them,
And from himself, a vain and insane hope— (p. 87)
175
The memory in its tireless seeking, just as is promised
by the hope of psychoanalysis, ferrets out the earliest
traumas, admits them, examines them. But even Freud was
not too successful in his attempt at self-analysis.
Perhaps the poet has no clinical intentions; perhaps he
does this, as he openly avows, to clarify, to under
stand— and with the hope of perfecting his will. What is
more touching than the need to reject both parents in
their totality? What is more extreme in the young than
the denial of self which Schwartz admits is "a vain and
insane hope— "? Already, the young boy watches himself;
if he cannot change altogether, then he can at least weed
out part of himself; but he must stay aware, awake, and
on the defensive— the beginning of the poet's supernally
active self-consciousness! In the very next prose sec
tion he is unjustly accused by the teacher and when she,
nevertheless, approaches him in his exile outside the
school room to comfort him, he feels,
. . . the wish to cry and the wish to suppress the
emotion,
The wish to howl his cause, and yet the wish to get
the kindness and not cry:
He tried, he turned his face away, the kindness
was too much,
He burst into tears! helpless with grief and self-
pity, already the actor and victim of what a constel
lation of emotions,
176
Injustice, paranoia, bursting tears, and most of
all, deliberate withdrawal to show his strength and
pride—
Already active in the fifth year; for this was the
beginning of his childhood, (p. 101)
Almost at the same time, another element of dis
turbance was being prepared. He loses his fountain pen
and tells his mother, asking her not to tell his father.
But when he goes to bed his father asks him where his pen
is. Hershey begins to lie. Jack Green smiles broadly
and proffers his own pen, pays no attention to Hershey's
lie. Hershey is overjoyed at the same moment that a
shadow of distrust engulfs him. His mother has betrayed
him.
--The sense that always underneath the face
Many a motive hid the truth, prepared
Illusions, made the mirage, deceived!
Life is a lie! Life is a long long lie, (p. 105)
Thus far a genesis is traced from rejection of his par
ents to rejection of himself to a split marked by victim
and actor in the drama he also watches and, finally, the
great betrayal. Again, explicitly, he names his early
self-consciousness. He adds:
My fear is light, narcissist interest
Engages me, as if 1 played a game—
A game of tennis, close, hotly contested
— Yet, at the same time, gazed from the grandstand,
cool! (p. Ill)
177
And here also Hershey gives an argument for avoiding
choice; this argument— or it is probably rationalization—
is associated in part with Schwartz's "life-style" an
emphatic and continuous incorporation. It is Schwartz
whose lines show this incorporative mode, but it is the
persona, Hershey, in Genesis who is given this comment.
Choice cuts the heart in half as the lungs breathe,
Those ultimate balloons 1 Choice cuts the heart
In half and throws away one half as if
The unelected half were useless rind! (p. Ill)
And the alternative to choice is not not to choose at all,
but it is to choose both, to consume both alternatives so
they are alternatives no longer. It is, certainly, not
an intellectual choice but an emotional one.
So the analysis continues; the hope, then, is that
the watcher who watches sensitively and completely will
be other than the one who is watched. The slight tran
scendence momentarily achieved is intellectual not
existential. The poet tells the story of his attempt to
get into the bathroom whence a pretty lady friend of his
mother's had retired, because he felt that inside there
she was naked and he wanted to see her naked.
Until grandmother drew him away, saying, Shame on
you! Shame on you!
The far-off cries of the Super-Ego!
178
Such heavy-handed interpolation of clinical jargon can
not help being ruinous to the poetry. But it is not this
language alone that accounts for the grossness of many
lines. Another sententious line is "The War again,
Cain's everlasting sin ..." (p. 108). It is the need
of the poet to bring his culture images into bas-relief,
so to speak, at every opportunity. Unsure about his
images— not what they are but what claims they have on
the other man, on the reader (because he suspected him
self of being, in a way, a monster)— he finds it neces
sary to buttress them with intellectualized images, all
built from a blueprint of logical argument. This intru
sion into the poetry sometimes works, sometimes is devas
tating. Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that
such passages as the following have a special importance:
When I looked down at Life for the first time,
It was as if I turned to the comic strips,
Unlikely slots and strips of comedy.
Speaking balloons I as if they did not live,
Had no true being (somewhat Platonic then
My frame of mind). But, as the clowns slid on,
Perceived the universals in the art,
Saw Jiggs as Everyman and Jiggs' wife
As the harsh criticism Everyman endures,
No here to his wife: at least, that is,
In lower-middle-class America,
Among the Joneses rising in the world,
Among that Mutt and Jeff, or Sancho Panza
And Don Quixote, deathless in his life— (p. 134)
The images— in the culture of America like Jung's arche
types— come from the deeps of consciousness, rise and
instruct as Schwartz repetitively teaches. It is worth
noting that in a great many, almost a majority, of the
reports of "trips" taken under psychedelic drugs, signif
icant encounters are made with cartoon characters, some
of which are the standard ones engraved on the mass mind,
others cartooned or caricatured representations of chil
dren or adults known by the subject of new "friends," who,
nevertheless, take on this exaggerated and satirical
nature; what it comes down to in such cases is the manu
facturing of a cosmic joke, heavy-handed and overstated
like many of Schwartz's representations. In fact, the
Freudian divisions of the personality— Ego, Id, and
Super-Ego— after a time, become more than imaginative
tools in a methodology, take on the body and size of
mythopoeic images.
The Id or daemon sleeps like a great river,
On it the Ego rowing back and forth— (p. 141
More of the poetic content is taken away from the
great ghosts, and is given to Hershey to speak— the older
Hershey; thus, the identification with the author,
Schwartz, becomes more open as the work draws to
180
conclusion. Events from the childhood of Hershey are
described and explained over and over; those chosen are
crucial and no nuance of action or understanding escapes
the analysis of the poet; nevertheless little of the
freshness of childhood is conveyed in the poetry. It is
mentioned, described, discussed but always by the ghosts
or by the older Hershey. There is more, really, of a
child's wonder and vision in the poem "'I am Cherry
5
Alive,' the Little Girl sang" than m the whole of
Genesis. It is the hand of Hershey but the voice of
Schwartz, as it were.
The marriage, unhappy and doomed, rocks on and one
sees the suffering laid on Hershey by the battling parents
who, in Schwartz's eyes, are too self-centered to notice.
Yet the child assumes the parents' way, particularly that
of his father who
Could not hold down the paranoiac ego, prepared
to believe that all, in the secret incestuous adul
terous heart he knew himself,
Enacted Iago, Brutus, Judas, Clytemnestra,
Delilah, or Gertrude,
Always betraying him! (p. 148)
His father leaves, finally, and divorce action is in the
5Summer Knowledge (Garden City, N. Y.: 1959), p.
161.
181
making. Eva refuses to move out of the comfortable house
until Jack promises that if she lets him sell it at a
profit he will come back home again; he moves them all
into a cheap apartment, and leaves. Even little Hershey
feels the deprivation and the betrayal. Now he realizes
his individuality.
The middle-class delights are not for you,
The handsome furniture, the set of silver,
— For you belong with us, remorse's troops,
Gaining through pain and through unhappiness,
Knowledge, freedom, hope, forgiveness, love! (pp.
176-177)
And so his childhood ended. The scene recalled is "The
husband trapped while dining with a whore" (p. 205);
Eva, with little Hershey in hand finds her husband at a
table in the fine restaurant of a roadhouse; she stands
and loudly berates him. He walks out with the child,
lights a cigarette. And Hershey "admired most of all his
father's poise and dignity, after Medea cried aloud and
Clytemnestra struck” (p. 205). The comment states ex
plicitly :
Childhood was ended here! or innocence
— Henceforth suspicious of experience!
The end of Genesis approaches; it rises like a fountain,
Hershey*s hope, crashes on the hard rock of cynicism
182
(which he learned from his father was intelligence!),
and, finally, it rises again at the very end. First, he
does not know, can not tell, that "Everything happens in
the mind of God." Actually,
This hideous scene presents the biggest truth,
Man's Nature is this being-in-the-world,
This in-ness is the wannest thing in Life,
This in-ness is the widest thing in Life,
This is the space in which you live your Life!
(p. 206)
Here is stated the insight which became his final funda
mental theme running through all of the last poems. This
is what one has, the only illumination, the only place to
explore, the only means by which one can explore. But
in "Dr. Bergen's Belief" Dr. Bergen insists that his
insights must face the final, full perspective of death,
and he leaps from a building to prove the value of this
perspective. In Genesis, published when Schwartz was
thirty, this hope rises like an organ-note in these last
two lines:
0 what a metaphysical victory
The first morning and night of death must be!
(p. 208)
CHAPTER IV
VAUDEVILLE FOR A PRINCESS
In Vaudeville for a Princess,* many of the poems
sustain the spareness and sharpness of the earlier lyrics
but reach only a certain cleverness. Only a few have the
profundity of the verse in Schwartz's first book and
fewer still retain the density. On the other hand,
something new is added— a shift in perspective.
The book is divided into three parts, distinct both
in title and theme. The first part names the book and
refers to Princess Elizabeth. Schwartz notes that the
title was suggested by "Princess Elizabeth's admiration
for Danny Kaye." Here, at the beginning, the view is
colder, more satirical, ironic. He has abandoned much
of the personal preoccupation, the great weight of youth
ful insight which had to be expressed in his early work.
^New York, 1950.
183
184
Delmore Schwartz is still at the center of each poem;
the same matters still affect him and demand expression,
but he is now looking at their surface; he is turning
outward for an examination of society in pretty much its
own terms, and his style is surer, speedier, even slicker.
The first section is a plain statement of Schwartz's
sensitivity to the absurd. Unable to discard his ration
ality, he finds it necessary to make use of it to comment
on the current attitudes evolving from existentialism.
In the first poem, "On a Sentence by Pascal," Pascal is
quoted, "True eloquence mocks eloquence,” and Schwartz
wishes to know,
Did that Frenchman mean
That heroes are hilarious
And orators obscene? (p. 3)
and he ends the short poem
And smiles, being meticulous,
Because truth is ridiculous, (p. 3)
The entire section is composed in the same fashion as
"Coriolanus and His Mother," only without the plot devel
opment— short poems interspersed with prose vignettes
airing Schwartz's opinions on existentialism, Hamlet,
Othello, driving automobiles, and the social responses of
a "great poet." What ties it together is the suggestion
185
of the absurd.
After the short introductory poem, the next poem,
"My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is" (p. 7), is a ragbag of
hysterical cynicisms held together by the fact that they
all relate to American history at the time of the Civil
War. Both the hysteria and the cynicism are noteworthy,
for they mark two widening reactions of the poet to the
contemporary scene.
The next poem, "I Did Not Know the Spoils of Joy"
(p. 13), takes refuge, as it were, in tinny, traditional
rhythm: "What that I was and a little tiny boy/ With a
hey ho, the wind and the rain" (p. 13). Again the state
ment is sarcastic, cynical, satirical as the case may be;
it is a recital of one disenchantment after another. It
was all very well for the clear-eyed, strong-voiced young
man to have written so insightfully about the perpetual
lack of solace in "The Repetitive Heart," but here the
writer shows that as the older man he faces the same dis
maying insights but with the ascerbity of greater commit
ment. In this book, in several poems where he forgets to
save himself by the comic frame, he is on his way to a
carping bitterness. Eventually, as in his last poems, he
develops a mode of salvation in which all disappointments
186
together with all contradictions are resolved by what
might be termed a massive affirmation. The poem shows
the small beginning of this mode in the repetition toward
the end of the idea, "And yet through all these mounting
fears/ How glad I am that I exist! " (p. 14) .
The next sad estate to be considered is that of the
poets themselves. "True Recognition Often Is Refused"
begins "We poets by the past and future used," and ends:
For we must earn through dull dim suffering
Through ignorance and darkened hope, and hope
Risen again and clouded over again, and dead
despair, (p. 20)
But Schwartz has a stronger point to make; the tone with
out the affirmation is a whine, but splendid affirmation
,saves both this bad poem and another poem in this sec
tion, "The Masters of The Heart Touched the Unknown"
(p. 34). Here Schwartz on a note of high appreciation,
exploits two themes which are found in his work from the
beginning--his appreciation for his intellectual and cul
tural heroes, and his respect for the powerful effort
they made (and therefore each of us should make) toward
self-knowledge. It is no accident that Socrates is
gchwartz's first and last hero; after citing the passion
ate culminations of Keats, Wilde, Mozart, Victor Hugo,
187
Baudelaire, Bronte, James, Wordsworth, and Dostoevsky,
he sums up:
These masters used their lives like Christmas trees
They skinned themselves alive to find the truth.
They gazed upon their vileness like excrement,
They ate their hearts to sate the need for love.
They fingered every coiled snake of the mind, (p. 35)
Part II consists of eight poems cast in a new mold.
The sarcasm, rather than irony, is there— each poem is
introduced by "Dear Citizens," whom he neither loves nor
considers enfranchised, but it is here that the shift in
perspective becomes obvious. These poems truly consti
tute a bridge between his first poems and his last. They
look backward to his early poetry in that they are iambic
pentameter dialogues with himself, the old arguing-out of
the problem, the setting forth of first one side then
the other so that the whole is finally illuminated. The
section is titled, "The True, The Good, and The Beauti
ful," and contains eight poems in which Schwartz puts
himself under third degree for moral and motive examina
tion— the "heavy bear" as against the ideal— with reality,
not as the reward but as the punishment. These poems in
their interlacing themes, the claims and counterclaims,
the occasional refrain, the accent on degradation,
absurdity, and despair are reminiscent of the eleven
" 188
terrifying philosophical poems in the section called "The
Repetitive Heart" in his first book. In both sets of
poems solace (the good, the true, and the beautiful) is
sunk almost irretrievably, except, in each case, for a
desperate, romantic affirmation of the ideal and the real
in combination. In the early poetry the accent of the
affirmation is on the real; it is on love and companion
ship, more the latter than the former:
When we are in step, running together,
Our pace equal, our motion one,
Then we will be well, parallel and equal
Moving together through time to all good.2
In the later poems of Vaudeville for a Princess, the ob
ject of the affirmation is more tenuous, more on the side
of the ideal; it is, in fact, the Socratic-Platonic imper
ative— the "know thyself." The last line of the last
poem in this section is "What is our hope except to tell
the truth?" (p. 63). This is followed by the emphasis on
the good, the true, and the beautiful. It can be con
tended that Schwartz has buried these abstractions under
a mire of savagery, absurdity, and horror, and that they
emerge, if at all, dripping with cynicism and despair;
2In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, p. 104.
- 189
they do emerge, nevertheless, and stand flashing on a
height as if they are signals of an irrepressible, eter
nal urge in the author and, therefore, in man. Thus the
affirmation here leans toward the abstract, points in the
direction of Schwartz's last poems. In these, it is more
tenuous even though at the heart of the celebration of
the physical world, and it moves from an attempt to in
clude mystical experience to the last resort— the affir
mation of affinnation itself.
Another, subtler change stems probably from the
greater maturity of the poet; a smoother, quieter, surer
line develops and it shows all the assets of the profes
sional, and also some of the liabilities as, for example,
it provides greater breadth and variety of texture but
neither digs as freshly nor explodes as sharply as the
earlier verse. The cause lies, it seems, in the accept
ance of certain common verbal counters which young poets
in their zeal to keep stereotype out of their poetry
urgently strive to avoid; the more mature poet, accepting
the necessity of working with words— most of which must
be well-thumbed counters— turns the conventional combi
nations to his own advantage; their use makes it possible
to widen the field of comment and speed and weight the
190
conclusions. Where, formerly, Schwartz would have been
avid to convey, in image and symbol, every experiential
nuance of the kinds of heartache, now he uses the general
statement to cover it in one line and thus move on, "And
of the evil native to the heart" (p. 53). Or he says,
"I am the pupil of emotion's wrongs/ Performed upon the
glory of this world" (p. 53). In his earlier poetry he
listed each of the wrongs, communicated the feeling of
them, the intense and intimate struggle. Before, he was
inside; now, he is beyond that, outside, and is able to
make a true discussion, to talk about these matters, to
make a summing up. This further stage may have the ten
dency to produce a prosier line, for there is almost as
much discourse as there is presentation, but the rhythm,
the density, the control at this point in Schwartz's
career, prevent this from occurring. All that has hap
pened is that a different aim is involved, a different
goal achieved. Instead of presenting the original strug
gle, he is now making conclusions; slightly removed from
the experience, older and wiser in the experiencing, he
has the right to look up from his personal agonies, set
them in their place in society, and sum it all up. And
this is the accomplishment of these eight poems.
191
In each of the first three of this set of eight
poems, Schwartz offers first a condemnation of the world
circumstance and his position in it, and then justifica
tion for it or for himself; since the circumstance is an
extreme contradiction of the true, the good, and the
beautiful, Schwartz's rejoinders, though truthful and
honest, mock themselves in their comparative weakness and
must rely for their final strength only on the fact of the
poem itself. This fact implies an insistence, a stub
bornness, and a gallantry which is the author's ultimate
stance, and which, it is implied, ought to be ours as
well. In a way, this is Schwartz's answer to Eliot's
"After such knowledge, what forgiveness?"3
The first poem gives the orientation in the title,
"He Heard The Newsboys Shouting 'Europe1 Europe1"' (p.
53). He has been excused from the war and feels called
upon to justify himself. He asks:
What have I done which is a little good?
What apples have I grasped, for all my years?
What starlight have I glimpsed for all my guilt?
(p. 53)
In the face of the holacaust, all he can reply is that he
3
The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York:
1962), p. 22.
is a poet, ". . .a student of the morning light/ . . . a
pupil of emotion's wrongs" (p. 53), and he adds that he
has dedicated himself to the true, the good, and the
beautiful. The tone at the close is rhapsodic, yet car
ries with it, considering the political situation pre
sented, a puling tone. This is an honesty Schwartz pre
ferred; this is precisely how any such declaration, no
matter its truth, must fall on the ear when positioned
this way. The juxtaposition exists on two levels, in
reality— the poet’s life in a society at war— and within
the poem. On the former level, the poet must question
himself; on the latter, the reader is asked to witness
the confrontation and to share it.
The second poem, "The Silence Answered Him Accusing
ly" (p. 54), continues the argument: '"Don't fool your
self,' the silence said to me, 'Don't tell yourself a
noble lie once more!'" (p. 54). And now, he merely adds
to his side the fact that he is also a teacher and teaches
the young about the true, the good, and the beautiful.
He ends the poem with, "Plato's starlight glitters amid
the shocking wars" (p. 54). The third poem, really just
one poem with the other two, is named, "Such Answers Are
Cold Comfort to the Dead" (p. 55). It points out that he
193
teaches for money while other boys are "slumped like
sacks on desperate shores" (p. 55). He again makes his
innocent plea for "the kinds of light," for the "wakeful
night," "unknown America," and "love's long defeat," and
closes with the gentle, "May I not cite this as a little
good?” (p. 55).
A recital of the vulgar joys of the playground, Luna
Park, in Coney Island, follows, but it is not the vulgar
ity that is uncovered but the unconscious unprotected,
the secret areas that find their satisfaction in such a
circus. This is, of course, an uncovering of us all,
and we are meant to see ourselves according to his vision.
Though we all are condemned, it must not be forgotten
that this is, before all, his vision. It is, at least at
the moment of writing, his "supreme fiction." And he
ends the poem relentlessly.
This is the Luna of the heart's desire,
This is the play and park we all admire, (p. 59)
Of the last four poems, two end in despair and two
with a hope that mocks hope: "What is our hope, except to
tell the truth?: (p. 63), and "What but with patient hope
to try again?" (p. 61). The poem, "Most Things at Second
Hand Through Gloves We Touch" (p. 62) ends:
194
Duncan is dead, and Desdemona, innocent,
Is choken to death. The true, the good,
And the beautiful have been struck down
Because of what they are. No matter what you say,
This is not brushed away. No matter what you say,
This is the way it is, year by year and day by day.
(p. 62)
Here, then, in his mid-thirties, the poet has taken in
ventory; he is no longer seeking to find himself; he
knows who he is and it has, for the moment, brought him
some peace and it has allowed him to craft some fine
professional verse. The poetry does not have the impact
of the earlier work, but it possesses a new authority and
knowledgeability; it is more complete, more sophisti
cated. Schwartz has become a man of the world— a man of
the poetic world. And, in the poetry, the pain of exper
ience seems no longer so immediate. The good is destroyed
perpetually by evil, truth distorted by desire, and
beauty blinded by vulgarity. What is left to do is to
try again and again, to hope, to tell the truth, and to
love. In his attempt to embrace and present reality,
which is both real and ideal, Schwartz is left with these
imperatives. The last one, love, leads into the third
section of the book, which is titled "The Early Morning
Light."
For Schwartz the morning, the early morning, has
always constituted a rebirth, a symbol of awakening, of
freshness, of renewal— "the travail of early morning, the
4
mystery of beginning/ Again and again." A quotation is
affixed beneath the title. It is from P. Scott Fitzger
ald, "In the real dark night of the soul, it is always
three o'clock in the morning" (p. 65). This is a sophis
ticated way of mentioning silver linings. So here we
are, being presented with the silver lining— a group of
forty love sonnets 1 And with this, the structure of the
book becomes clear. The sonnets are to Elizabeth Pollet,
who became the poet's wife for a time, and the book is
called Vaudeville for a Princess. Thus, the first sec
tion of the book elaborates the disappointments of the
rational man in the absurd universe, the second section
the horror of the good man at the evil in society, and
the third section the salvation by love which is coupled
with beauty. Taken in order, this covers the true, the
good, and the beautiful, and is an appropriate vaudeville
for the poet's true princess, Elizabeth (Pollet) to whom
it is appropriately dedicated. The elaborate pun is also
4
"In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave," In Dreams
Begin Responsibilities, p. 134.
196
contributed to by the fact that Schwartz conceived of
himself— especially in connection with his beloved— as a
clown or a "heavy bear," and this is, of course, precise
ly the distance between Princess Elizabeth and Danny Kaye.
The third section contains forty poems, thirty-five
of which are sonnets— fourteen lines each (though one has
an extra line [p. 105]) divided into two stanzas, the
second being the Italian sestet. By and large, these are
constructed with fair rigor, the area weakest in conform
ity and widest in possibility is the rhyme scheme; here
Schwartz allowed himself greater latitude than he had in
the sonnets he had published in In Dreams Begin Responsi
bilities . Here almost any combination of quatrain rhyme
schemes may be found, and sometimes a line forgets to
rhyme at all or never intended to. The five poems which
do not approach the sonnet structure are simply separate
lyrics, each possessing its own organic structural varia
tion (pp. 86, 87, 90, 91, and 92). "Twelfth Night, Next
Year, a Week-end in Eternity" (p. 90) seems to be a blown-
up or gaseous sonnet; it has fourteen lines and a ragged
rhyme scheme that is a lumbering approximation of the
sonnet, but the meter is so loose and, in cases, muddles
down into a prose rhythm so heavy that one hesitates to
197
assign it to this class of poems. It hasr in fact, signs
of structural loosening, which point to the loosening of
Schwartz's line in his last poetry; it is, nevertheless,
and despite its poor close, a lovely poem. Thus, this
poem is not only an example of a fine effort of the
poet's which is not fully realized but it acts, also, as
an early indication of the direction in which his verse
is heading; it shows the lengthening of the line, the
flat, prosy statement, and possibly for the first time,
the opening of a line to mystical apprehension through
hypnotic repetition: "And listening and silent, and
silent and listening, and listening and silent" (p. 90).
Although this section is titled "The Early Morning
Light" which, as was indicated, is a repeated and legi
timate symbol Schwartz uses for renewal, rebirth, and
hope, these themes assert themselves against a miasma of
doubt, cynicism, and despair. Certainly the power of the
upsurge of enthusiasm, hope, and joy in some of the
lines— and supposedly in the poet since these are direct
lyric expressions— is often able to counteract the great
negations which usually precede or follow them. In these
sonnets, celebrating his relationship with the young
woman who became his second wife, there is seldom living
198
space for pure joy or happiness untainted by self-con
scious self-deprecation or by cynicism and doubt or by
hopeless assessments of the poet's place in modern
society. America is examined, accepted, and rejected.
Modern success, eyed askance, turns out to be failure.
Yet the poet deplores his inability to achieve it. Even
the relationship he has with his beloved is exposed in
its limitations, all of his fears and timidities ruth
lessly illumined.
To examine the last theme first, one need only look
at the final line in two sonnets which face each other on
the pages— these are the sixth and seventh in the series.
The sixth is called "The Self Betrayal Which Is Nothing
New" (note should be made of all the names of these
poems— names that sound like first lines but only occa
sionally are) and the seventh sonnet which is called "I
Wish I Had Great Knowledge or Great Art." Given in order,
the last two lines are:
The one who wants to know her endlessly
and
Two worlds are separated endlessly
Here is the terrible and romantic circumstances where the
deepest need is met by the bitterest opposition. These
199
lines constitute the twin classifications under which the
thematic material of the sonnets may be listed, the
enthusiastic and joyous moments in the class of the deep
est need, and the doubts and denigrations in the class of
opposition, the former his wanting "to know her endless
ly" and the latter "two worlds" that are "separated end
lessly. "
Specific presentations of these two themes inter
twine in most of the sonnets; only very seldom does a
sonnet offer one alone. Examining "The Self-Betrayal
Which Is Nothing New," one sees another facet of the same
problem; in the very moment which leads the poet to de
clare his endless need for his lover, he also shows the
dilemma of having to become— in order to be "most pros
perous for her"— the very being which could not need her
"endlessly."
what can I do
To make myself most prosperous for her?
I asked myself, conjuring dignities:
Bestseller book or hit upon Broadway,
All of the limelight's bright banalities,
Hurried to Hollywood and a photoplay
Or a high chair in the old academies?
And he concludes that he is in the deplorable situation
just outlined:
200
Lucky or strong I can get everything
But what I want the most! For having these,
I would be but a matinee's false king,
For in that glare and gilt, I would not be
The one who wants to know her endlessly.
There is no doubt that frequently the Schwartz poem
comes in like a lion— and fails to maintain its initial
strength. That the failure is just as frequently good
poetry regardless of the fact that it is not up to the
opening is another matter. Sometimes, however, the poem
dissipates as it moves on and finally is unrealized. The
first sonnet in this section, "The Winter Twilight Glow
ing Black and Gold," opens the section magnificently. It
has a lengthy title that sounds like a first line, as
have all the other sonnets in this group. And, though it
is picturing a "let-down," it is too much of a let-down
poetically as well.
The sonnet is divided into two stanzas— the first,
eight lines, the second, six. In the first stanza
Schwartz produces a brilliant image to convey at what
stage he is in life:
That time of year you may in me behold
When Christmas trees are blazing on the walk,
Raging amid stale snow against the cold
And low sky's bundled wash, senseless as chalk.
Characteristically, he makes use of the adjusted quota
tion, much as Eliot did before him. Thus, derivatively
201
speaking, the reader starts by hearing overtones of
Shakespeare and Eliot, moves on to a second line reminis
cent of Allen Tate's "Sonnets at Christmas," touches in
the fifth line on a chord from Harte Creme, in "Hissing
and ravenous the brilliant plant/ Rising like eagerness,"
moves on to a note from Auden in the second stanza, "But
this is only true at four o'clock/ At noon the fifth year
is once more abused," and ends, finally, with a
Schwartzian emphasis:
I bring a distant girl apples and cake,
Pictures, secrets, lastly my swollen heart,
Now boxed and tied by what I know of art
— But as before accepted and refused.
This is not only what it states explicitly— that the
poet offers his affirmation, his bursting enthusiasm to a
girl; all that he proffers is accepted, then refused.
Schwartz is saying that the ambivalence he encountered
from one he admired at four years old is repeated when he
again, as an adult, offers a girl his heart, but he also
makes the reference to his heart being "boxed and tied by
what I know of art." What he has to add, in fine, is his
poetry; he has a new loyalty. And could it be that his
offering in meter, receives from those it is bestowed
upon, precisely the same acceptance and refusal accorded
202
his person years before?
The second stanza is prosy, flat, and colorless com
pared with the first— not that the dismal quality needed
is best obtained by such language. This is a falling off
from the rhetoric of the first stanza as if the weariness
of the rejection entered finally into the poetic line
itself where it does not have to be. It promises at the
beginning to be a poem of the persona's rejection not the
poet's impotence.
Compared with many other of the sonnets this is,
nevertheless, a good poem; a large percentage of the
others fall off just as does this one, but they fall
farther and flatter.
Mot all the sonnets are love poems; some mark a sad
apex of sobriety, the moment when a glance, unfueled by
feeling, reveals the grey world of an enervated poet.
The vibrancy of discovery is gone; the early rage and
protest is gone. What of the early morning light?
Schwartz finds most appropriate "the oyster light of the
wool sky," and he asks: "Is this not, after all, appro
priate/ Light for a long-used poet such as I?" (p. 91).
The poet still sounds his challenges but they seem like
familiar gestures without the persuasion of power. He
asserts that there is a Santa Claus but "his hands are
dirty, his fingers inkstained, and his arms weak," and he
issues his promise referring to Santa Claus as "A sad
clown in polka gown whom my applause/ Will once more
invigorate, before the coming wars" (p. 90). It is as if
the initial attack has petered out; the cavalry of ra
tionality, the poiniards and lances of the Cartesian
culture have been blunted with use while the enemy, hav
ing absorbed all the punishment, looms just as formidible
on a horizon that creeps closer and closer. What has
happened, put another way, is this: the real and the
ideal seem just as separated, just as irreconcilable as
they ever were, no matter how strong the poet's asser
tions to the contrary. They are precisely as far apart
as— through the power of his position defined by his
culture heroes— he has insisted on keeping the subjective
and the objective apart. He is at the point where he has
worn out his world; he is on the verge of impassivity,
apathy, paralysis. In brief, he has taught himself to go
with the red light and stop with the green, and he has
seen, for some time, that both are burning brightly. It
is, in fact, salvation that he is going to have to seek
both as a poet and a man, and this will involve an
ability, somehow, to get himself out of the dilemma of
intrinsic separation— stylistically, philosophically,
and emotionally.
CHAPTER V
SUMMER KNOWLEDGE
Judged by his last poems, Schwartz shows signs of
dissatisfaction with his earlier technique; he is coming
closer to his subject matter and his earlier style will
not convey the experience. Admittedly, there are at
least two ways to go. Some aver that "health" requires
walking the tightrope that keeps one at the middle dis
tance in style; to plunge is to fall into a maelstrom of
uncommunicating verbal fragmentation. All one can do—
keeping the discipline of a firm middle distance— is to
attempt subtle and genteel variations which will certainly
communicate— even if they do not communicate enough. It
is even probable that the reader's experience of a poem
is not the experience that triggered the author into
writing it, nor the same as the experience of writing it,
nor even the same as the author's experience on reading
his own poem. The variables are infinite. But perhaps
205
206
those who hold for immediate clarity do not take into
consideration this possibility: that the sensibility of
an era does change, and that because of this what one
generation finds uncommunicative, another is at home with.
His last poems show Schwartz on the necessarily loosened
tightrope, driven by his incorporative need, attempting
gyrations which, though perfectly and heroically per
formed, fail at the level of the subtlest intimacy and
fail only comparatively and for his own time.
Part of the appeal of modern romantic poetry lies in
the magic of mystery, the ambiguity which is a promise of
the beyond— of gratification that does not exist anywhere.
It is also the promise of knowledge and wholeness. This
is the potentiality of symbols, esotericism, magic.
Schwartz gave up this little by little as he matured.
His early poems, taut, but with the flexibility of sap
lings are such poems of magic and promise, ambiguous,
romantic, and craftily drawn, though, in many ways, they
imitate the clear and classical. They are young, efful
gent, and, like crossed sticks, they make a stab at
insight and myth with what, if carefully examined, turns
out to be a protective cosmic archness. Schwartz grew
207
aware of this. In Summer Knowledge,*1 the first section,
which is devoted to many of these early poems, is per
fectly titled, "The Dream of Knowledge." This assurance
of significance creates a fundamental excitement; it also
contains the child's excitement of anticipation, but, as
time passed, Schwartz changed, producing, in a long,
prosy, line a shrug of irony, the age-old radical sophis
tication of his people, or else the common plateau of the
disenchanted.
But Schwartz is never simply negative; he, like
everyone else, is the hero of his own dreams and these
are dreams of affirmation. The subtitle to the first of
the two main divisions of Summer Knowledge, "The Dreams
Which Begin in Responsibilities," is a reversal of the
name of his first book and he is referring to his early
poems which follow. Part two— headed "Summer Knowledge"
— has five subsections: "The Fulfillment," "Morning
Bells," "The Kingdom of Poetry," "The Deceptive Present,
the Phoenix Year," and "The Phoenix Choir." The perfect
titles tell the whole story in themselves. They are a
questioning, a gathering together of all judgments and
■^Garden City, N. Y.: 1959.
208
insights, an exorcism, a celebration of life, and a seek
ing of reinforcement of assent in the lives of others.
Now it ought to be emphasized that exegesis reduces; the
cut-and-dried tone of analysis belies the biblical mag
nificence of many of these poems. Schwartz seems to
know that the chips are down, that he has reached the end
of incorporation, that poetry and protest can do only so
much; surrounded by the closed system of human limitation,
he has scoured the inside surface for ways out. Now he
is thrown back, as all men are thrown back, on what has
been given from the first. If he cannot actually tran
scend this, he will at least perform the act of tran
scendence and, if nothing else, at least heroism and
beauty will sputter against the darkness. The summarium
in excelsis begins. One is tempted to quote Stevens
further from "Puella Parvula":
. . . Hear what he says,
The dauntless master, as he starts the human tale.^
Schwartz begins with the open admission of ritual.
"At a Solemn Musick" borrows teutonic gravity and pomp by
2
Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (New York: 1957),
p. 456.
its spelling; as usual, he is protectively mocking his
own seriousness. Let us have a ritual of chant and song,
he is saying, and let it be a grave admission of limita
tion and a celebration of the true and only power. Each
stanza begins with instructions to the musicians and
singers. "Now may the chief musician say" (p. 147), is
the first of these. The poem traces life in the world
where "Lust and emulation . . . have inhabited our hearts
. . . and ravished/ The substance of pity and compas
sion" (p. 147). But the quotidian is perpetually re
deemed by "The river of morning ..." which flows ". . .
out of the splendor of the tenderness of surrender"
(p. 147). One recalls that morning is always the fresh
beginning. Then occurs a key sentence, "Nothing is more
important than summer” (p. 147) . The association here
is with the title of the book and so a faint overtone of
the word "knowledge" rings slightly in the mind followed
by a question mark, and is answered in the following
fashion; Schwartz brings up the great question of death
as if to ask what knowledge or even "summer Knowledge”
can have to say about this, and then gives his first
answer:
210
The phoenix is the meaning of the fruit,
Until the dream is knowledge and knowledge is a
dream. (p. 147)
He describes the choir as "Ascending and descending the
heights of assent ..." (p. 148). And now, at the end
of the poem, he gives his final answer though not in its
fullest form? later his answer is developed and built
upon. This is addressed to "love and love's victory"
(p. 147), love being the strongest affirmation, the oppo
site to self:
Before the morning was, you were:
Before the snow shone,
And the light sang, and the stone,
Abiding, rode the fullness or endurec the empti
ness
You were: you were alone. (p. 148)
But self is what Schwartz's poetry is about; it is self
and selfhood which to this point has always been affirmed,
if only between the lines. The poet knows that his
salvation lies in another direction. He is his own medi
cine man, concocting beautiful spells in which he does
not wholly believe. In other words, the integrity is in
the poem as exorcism, as a legitimate expression, but the
effectiveness of the chosen means is doubted— it seems by
Schwartz— and also, somehow, by the reader. One is
tempted to argue that it is impossible to make such a
211
separation. Where does the reader get his impressions if
not from the poem? This is a case where reader, poet,
poem, and subject are separated; each has a life and a
kingdom of its own. And when the separate worlds unite
in the coalescence of reader insight, a complexity, even
an apparent contradiction, can result.
"The Fulfillment," the third poem in this section,
continues the dialectic. The poet has already brought up
the question of knowledge; though he returns to it later,
now he takes up "the dream." The poem sets up an imag
ined point of transcendency, an after-life, as it were,
from which this life is evaluated. Schwartz writes
bitterly of the frequency with which he was admonished,
Beware of all your desires. You are deceived.
(As they are deceived and deceptive, urgent and
passingl (p. 150)
With such an admonition goes the great promises of the
City of God, given in the first half of each of the fol
lowing two lines. But in the second half is that part of
the statement which, in a sense, Schwartz takes over in a
change of tone; the terseness .and repetition bespeak a
bitterness which is the poet's not the promiser's.
They will be wholly fulfilled. You will be dead.
They will be gratified. And you will be dead!
(p. 150)
212
The poet pictures himself in just such a circumstance
where— giving all credit due— "all things existed purely
in the action of joy . . . only as the structures of
joy!" (p. 150). And then he adds that "It was then we
saw what was lost as we knew where we had been ...”
(p. 150) . And here the reader is brought to the first
step of the celebration of living. The drama of his
statement gains through contrast with the device of the
for
imagined transcendency.
And knew for the first time the richness and poverty
Of what we had been before and knew no more,
The striving, the suffering, the dear, dark hooded
mortality, (p. 151)
The fulfillment of the old expectation is not ful
fillment; there is either no fulfillment or it lies in
the world, and the richness (and the poverty) of exist
ence is not only dramatically unveiled at the end of the
last stanza, but with it, in tone, a tragic longing for
the world, a treasuring of the things in it, that can
come only from one who knew them once but can never know
them again.
The last two poems in this section are of special
significance; no other poems in the remaining sections
have the centrality— or the success— of these. One is a
213
prayer, the other a celebration, and together they con
stitute as complex a meditation as any one o£ the four
quartets of Eliot. "The First Morning of The Second
World" picks up where "The Fulfillment" leaves off; the
Second World is the world of Lazarus when he returns.
The lost soul of "The Fulfillment" has returned to the
world, sees it fresh and new. The poet in another sense
is being twice-born; the transcendency is not just a
device any longer, it is an accomplished fact. The
breakthrough i£5 a breakthrough into love and, momentarily,
out of the bonds of self. Schwartz accurately pictures
himself at the beginning of the poem,
. . . locked
And intent in that vigil in which the hunter is hunted,
as the mind is, seeking itself, falconer, falcon and
hawk, victor and victim, (p. 152)
What he pictures next is, perhaps, not so much a break
through as a breaking. At base only hostility and fear
could build the network of armament used for his protec
tion— the play at the role of the clown, the irony, the
occasional smart-alec sophistication. Though none of
this clouded the honesty of his work, it produced count
less feints and divagations, moues and modes, and it set
the tone of struggle, sadness, and disappointment. Now
214
comes the statement of release in what he refers to in
the poem, "At A Solemn Musick," as "the tenderness of
surrender" (p. 147). Compassion is aroused when he
describes the situation: "The gun of the mind ached in my
numb and narrowed gaze" (p. 152). His mind with its
insistence on a special and respected kind of wholeness,
his former style with its reliance on the logical enter
prise once called "tension" by Allen Tate could no longer
maintain the same old coping; the moment is at hand when
a widening of his concept of knowledge must occur, and
when the style must loosen to contain it.
Certainly and suddenly, for a moment's eternity,
it was the
ecstasy and stillness of the white
wizard blizzard, the white god fallen, united,
entirely whiteness
The color of forgiveness, beginning and hope.
(p. 152)
The next stanza continues the experience, buiids a holiday
of whiteness, and takes him into memory. He is moving
from the general, the abstract (he has already called
anger abstract) to the particular, divesting himself of
hostility.
— How could I have known that the years and the hopes
were human beings hated or loved, (p. 153)
There they were, all of them, and I was with them,
They were with me, and they were me, I was them,
forever united
215
As we all moved forward in a consonance silent and
moving
Seated and gazing
Upon the beautiful river forever. (p. 153)
In part two of the poem he begins the identification of
love with knowledge which will find its fullest resolu
tion in the poem, "Summer Knowledge"— "There is nothing to
think but drink of love and knowledge, and love's know
ledge" (p. 153). He admits that he is dropping his
defenses, ”... and no more masks or unmasking" (p. 153).
His surrender goes even further; he refers to "thought's
abdication" which "... quickens thought's exultation,"
and "My lips trembled, fumbled and in the depths and
death of thought ..." (p. 154). The sharp differentia
tions of words blur in the process of repetition and
ritual; acuteness of thought dissolves in the attempt to
contain, control, and communicate the uncontrollable
swell of feeling and insight.
Suddenly and certainly I saw how surely the measure
and treasure of pleasure is being as being with,
belonging
Figured and touched in the experience of voices in
chorus,
Withness is ripeness,
Ripeness is withness,
To be is to be in love,
Love is the fullness of being. (p. 154)
One can only betray the experience in attempting to
216
communicate it, especially in exposition, yet the attempt
should be made. Part 3 begins with a rapturous descrip
tion of the encounter with this experience of love. What
is felt, in part, is possibly the ecstasy of relieving
oneself of the burden of self— a burden unseemly heavy
for a poet who turned, twisted, probed, and scarred him
self decade after decade. The second stanza of Part 3
begins, "Suddenly, suddenly and certainly" (p. 155). The
repetition of "certainly" in the poem is in its context
almost a refrain; the joys of certitude are surely appre
ciated by a man who has had to maintain the tension of
provisionality all his life. He emphasizes the freshness
of the moment and, finally, arrives, toward the end of
the poem, at the great final identification of love and
renewed life. This is a moment of tremendous and fresh
experience for the poet; it promises rebirth, even eter
nal life, in a special sense, and Schwartz, seeking to
give the experience its fullest rendering, compares it to
the discovery of the second world by Lazarus. Only a
complete quotation of this ending can supply the immense
reaches of excitement, the astonishingly rich organ note
that rises— with more complexity if less rhetoric than
the ending of Dylan Thomas' poem, "Ceremony After a Fire
217
Raid":
Quickly and certainly it was the little moment when
Lazarus
Thrusting aside the cold sweated linens,
Summoned by Jesus, snow and morning
Thrust the stone aside, the fell conclusion,
And knew all astonishment for the first time,
wonderstruck
Not that he lived again, after the wood, the stone,
the closing, nails, and black silence empty,
But that he had ever died. Knew the illusion of
death confused with the reality of the agony of
dying.
Knowing at last that death is inconceivable among the
living
(Knowing the wish, the hope, the will, the luxury and
ignorance of the thought that man can ever die)
Hearing the thunder of the news of waking from the
false dream of life that life can ever end. (pp.
155-156)
Though Schwartz was not "Summoned by Jesus," he was sum
moned by the snow and morning— the call to renascence—
as he points out in the second line above.
"Summer Knowledge," which follows, seeks to convey
the experience of the kind of knowledge which Schwartz is
substituting for the mixture of closed systems— concepts
and values— which have held his loyalty to this point.
If there is a new difference it is in insight and feel
ing; it appears to be a spontaneous, mystical acceptance
which yields an enriched and exultant perceptivity.
Summer knowledge is not picture knowledge, nor is it
the knowledge of lore and learning
218
For summer knowledge is the knowledge of death as
birth
For, in a way, summer knowledge is not knowledge at
all; it is second nature, first nature fulfilled,
a new birth
In the consummation and the annihilation of the blaze
of fall. (p. 157)
The temptation is to continue to transfer as much of
this material to the expository level as possible. This
is not only because the material is fascinating but
because it seems too possible to do it. Now this is not
the usual characteristic of mystical experience. Such
experience is supposed to be ineffable. It should be, by
and large, beyond the communicative power of words; in
truth, it does result here in an unusual amount of para
dox per linear inch, but the possibility of successfully
discoursing on it looms large. It may be because Schwartz
himself is providing the discourse; though he is writing
poetry— if only because of the sublimity— it is a pecu
liar poetry, very close to discussion, to discourse, to
prose. He is talking too much about his subject; he is
not excellently enough rendering it. For many obvious
reasons it is fair to say that his goal is more than dis
cussion, and it is fair, then, to conclude that his means
219
are not up to his ends. This is a failure in style
brought about by his inability to foreshorten his focus
on his material, while, at the same time, he sought to
communicate intimately. There was a time when this
approach was equal to intimate communication; the para
doxes of St. John of the Cross are a good example. But
they will not do for now— incorporated into a poem by
Eliot, or separately on their own— any more than
Schwartz's will do for him and for now. Schwartz moved
inward in vision and outward in style when he should have
/
taken the direction of a Rimbaud, Crane, or Ashbery.
The material just considered is central; the other
poems in this section of Summer Knowledge are corollary
or decorative. The group titled "Morning Bells" contains
just what its title implies— lyrics (six of them) of a
fresh and positive nature. Only one calls for special
attention: the lovely song, "'I am Cherry Alive,' The
3
Little Girl Sang." This is, in a sense, a presentation
of Stevens' theme in his partial line, "Fictive things
3
"Is it the morning? Is it the little morning?"
(p. 166) has the same freshness.
220
4
wink as they will," or one might say that the theme of
Schwartz's poem is the power of the subjective in the
process of making differentiations. Or, it is the fresh
ness of the perception of youth which can, without bat
tle, accept the paradox or the contradiction as the truth
of reality. Or, again, it is the ability of the young
not only to believe in magic but to exercise it. And,
finally, it is a singing about the irrepressible confi-
I I
dence of youth, its naive arrogation to itself of cen
trality and omniscience.
"I am red. I am gold. I am green. I am blue,
I will always be me, I will always be new! (p. 161)
The next group, "The Kingdom of Poetry," repeats
his earlier assertions and advances his thesis only
slightly, but it contains two successful poems: "Gold
Morning, Sweet Prince," and "Vivaldi." In the former
the substitution of "Gold" for "Good" and "Morning" for
"Night," as in the famous phrase from Hamlet is not
merely a good example of the punning from which Schwartz
was never far, but it contains, as almost all Schwartz's
4
Wallace Stevens, "A High-Toned Old Christian
Woman," The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York,
1957), p. 59.
writing at this point contained, the promise of the
cycle, which is the promise of rebirth— and the seed for
which may be found in Schwartz's use and reuse of the
word "endless" in his early poetry as well. "Everything
is circular," wrote William James when he rose from a
dream in the small hours of the morning and thought he
had the ultimate answer; Schwartz in his dream of know
ledge returns to the circular, the cycle in which the
deeply feared death is always the precursor of birth. In
such a belief, it is possible that Schwartz finally gave
way to wish, and felt the relief and the reward in the
acceptance, finally, of a little illusion like a balm.
One recalls, "Beware of all your desires. You are
deceived ..." (p. 150) from "The Fulfillment," and in
"Gold Morning, Sweet Prince,"
So there is no choice but the choice of love, unless
one chooses
Never to love, seeking immunity, discovering nothing
ness. (p. 174)
and the great wish faced at last and stated,
Gold morning, sweet prince, black night has always
descended and has always ended . . . (p. 174)
Schwartz does not hesitate to use phrases from other
writers for his own purposes in his line; sometimes these
phrases are punned upon or changed; usually they work,
222
providing an additional richness. In this poem, he bor
rows from Shakespeare, "Ripeness is all," and this he
follows with "the rest is silence," and then adds,
. . . we are such stuff as love has made us
And our little life, green, ripe, or rotten, is what
it is
Because of love accepted, rejected, refused and
jilted, faded, raided, neglected or betrayed.
(p. 174)
Many things are occurring at the same time, in
Schwartz the man probably, in Schwartz the poet undoubt
edly, and in the symptomatic poetry almost certainly. It
is a discourtesy that comment often displaces text. One
must carefully select. A matter that must be mentioned,
however, is this: on the one hand the poetry seems to be
an effort of honesty beyond honesty, and it is immensely
successful in communicating the powerful emotion, the
insight and a good part of the experience the poet is
attempting to fix for the reader. On the other hand— at
the same time— the mode of the poet, the poetic style,
has collapsed, and is becoming, in these later poems,
incapable of meeting the demands that are placed upon it.
It is— put another way— expanding, becoming gaseous; the
minute, the acute, can no longer be expressed with the
tool of this style; the building units of the poetry are
223
much greater in size than in the earlier work and can not
be examined with care and with a magnifying glass. One
must stand back from the textf if one would see the
amorphous outlines of these construction units, very much
as one stands back from Ginsberg's poetry, or from the
ritual of any aboriginal chant of magic. In this sense,
the poems are better read aloud as incantation and
exorcism. And there is still another "on the other hand"
which must be added— comment on that which seems, from
the clues in the poetry, to have been happening to the
man and the poet. But first, a quotation from "Vivaldi,"
an extremely successful poem which purports to be about
the music of Vivaldi but which, at the same time, has two
other aims— to contain the style which is slipping away
like water turning to steam, and also to extend and en
rich Schwartz's central theme in this section. The poem
ends as follows:
Far from the world of Caesar and Venus, calculation
and sensuality, ratiocination and frustration,
This is the dark city of the hidden innermost wish,
The motion beyond emotion,
The power beyond and free of power,
Beyond beyond within the withness of with-
ness,
This is the immortality of mortality, this
Is supreme consciousness
The Self-forgetting in the self possessed and mastered
In the elation of being open to all relation
224
No longer watchful, wakeful, guarded, wary, no longer
striving and climbing:
This is the immortality of immortality
Deathless and present in the presence of the
deathless present.
This is the grasped reality of reality, moving forward
Now and forever, (p. 179
The poem has marginal notes indicating the "time" of
each section as if it were a piece of music— "Allegro
cantabile," "Scherzo," etc. These directions plus the
variation in rhythm occurring in each area as indicated
by the directions— not a regular rhythmic change each
time but a partial change, an imagined shift— do act as
additional elements of formal structure bracing the poem,
buttressing the lines.
It is true that this is Eliotesgue, but it strikes
a true note of Schwartz's as well. The similarity to
Eliot is really the similarity of most incantatory poetry.
Such poetry seeks to move the sensibility up and out of
its analytical moorings, usually into an undifferentiated
ecstasy. The rationale for this effort is that the
consciousness dilates, that one gains in awareness as
well as in perception. And there is ample reason to
suppose that this is the case, so long as widening is not
confused with distortion and displacement— both of which
can be rewarding but are, nevertheless, of another degree
225
if not nature. This is why there is always the metaphysi
cal import attached to incantatory poetry. Refrains,
repetitions alone, do not make an incantation. They may
be hypnotic (as in the dialogue of the theatre of the
absurd, Ionesco, for example) or they may be exciting
(as in a jazz refrain), but neither Eliot nor Schwartz
shows such an aim in his verse. Schwartz is, in fact,
making a profound effort at seership, and this style has
a gyrating rhythm to accommodate the affirmative, mysti
cal, cyclical feeling.
The rise in tone, the elation, the sense of exulta
tion is, of course, achieved through the rhythm and the
repetition. Discounting, just this once, the powerful
effect of the connotations as well, one can become
shocked at the banality of the naked denotative meanings.
The only purpose for such a reduction— since it is
hardly the point when considering poetry— is to inquire
whether another failure is not in preparation here, one
concoramitant with the failure in his style. Line by
line the above quotation reads something like this: "Far
from the world of power and sex where one has to think,
where one risks frustration is one's wishful inner self
which is not subject to external pressures; it is the
central life/energy and is not aware of itself. It is
happy because it has no ambition, does not need to strive.
It is immortal because (probably) we all have it." What
this boils down to is the simple dictum that even when
we lose all the rewards, we still have the best thing
left— and it can never be taken away from us— our own
selves 1 Now roy comment is likely to irritate; on the
face of it, it is an insulting reduction. Not for a
moment can one pretend that this is all there is to the
poetry. But it might occasion, at least, a pause— to
wonder what has happened to the acute conceptual powers
exhibited in the early poetry. An answer that occurs is
that they are set aside in favor of the titanic emotional
struggle which continues. A better answer is given by
the totality of the verse, beyond the denotative, and
this tells that the self one is left with is a non-self,
that Schwartz in this passage abandons self as it is
usually known, and that he now realizes he is only his
own experience from moment to moment. But this does not
derive from the denotation; it is a triumph of the total
poem, set against all the rest of his poetry.
The poet has already spoken of rebirth into love and
the love he refers to is a selflessness; here, in the
227
music, the selflessness is incarnate. There is no longer
anything so mundane as a love object; both the subject
and the object disappear. What is left is "the self-
forgetting in the self-possessed and mastered." Although
Schwartz claims, in the lines above, that this is the
supreme consciousness, one may be pardoned for substitut
ing understanding for agreement; it is more important to
follow this complex, profound and ingenious exorcism to
the very end, keeping in mind the levels involved, real
izing that some things that are commented on here occur
in the poetry, in the reader, in the author, and others
in the author alone. Again one returns to the poet, the
poem, the reader, and the world. And one returns, as
well, to Schwartz's first story published so many decades
before these last poems— the story in which, it was pointed
out, three levels of Delmore were occupied with Delmore,
his origins and his future.
By now it should become clear that the poet protests
too much, that the word "hope" appears as often as "cer
tainty" and more often than "love." The persuader is
trying desperately to persuade himself? the disenchanted
is building an enchanted life preserver— literally— and
the faster he falls, the more furious the fervor. One
_ 228
can weep at the pathetic— no, tragic— "no longer watch
ful, wakeful, guarded, wary ..." not only— and this is
the power of the poem— for the poet's special case, but
for others and many and everyone. But to understand that,
in a sense, this statement from the poem is a lie is more
difficult. On the level of his own life (though, at the
very same time this is not a dishonest poem), Schwartz
never did forego the watchfulness and wakefulness. The
ritual remained a ritual, and really did not work— for
him, at least. The biographical fact is only significant
here if it helps one to see the nature and use of such
verse, not necessarily its success or failure for the man
who wrote it or for the reader. As a matter of fact, one
could even say that it was successful for Schwartz, but
only because it gave him an upsurge of writing, providing
him with a refreshed theme. On this, frankly, his life
hung and his sanity. So far as straightforward belief is
concerned, however, he was unable to believe— at all, in
any way, and not even for a moment.
But he went on weaving the spell. If music can
bring this apotheosis of the spirit about, then, of
course, so can poetry. Perhaps, the unkindest comment
one could make on the least excellent of these poems,
"The Kingdom of Poetry," is that it reads like a spiritual
Baedeker; Schwartz is at middle remove from his material,
he is telling about it rather than presenting it. It
takes a compression rather than an expansion to present
it— in this writer's opinion. Some might say, simply,
that Schwartz is at base a prose writer who writes here
with a strong prose rhythm; taking into account the early
poetry with its highly individual sound and particular
Schwartzian rhythm, this estimate seems untenable. "The
Kingdom of Poetry" is a paean in which poetry is called
"the actuality of possibility" and "the consummation of
consciousness in the country of the morning." Here the
language blurs into continuous hyperbole and the effect
of repetition is not so much hypnotic as boring. Never
theless, the desperate exultation prevails.
Schwartz has moved from snow to morning to love to
rebirth to selflessness; it is necessary, within the
logic of this development, that it be crowned with the
sovereignty of poetry, for poetry is "the sunlight of
consciousness" (p. 188) and "the meaning of morning and/
The mastery of meaning" (p. 189). These lines constitute
one of the clues to the fact that what transpires on
230
paper for the reader can not be taken as straight confes
sion about what went on in the poet. In this kingdom of
poetry, we can not feel that the abandonment of the old
self is accomplished to make way for the new, as the
other poems— hostels for the pilgrim on his way up the
hill—imply. Into this poem creeps meaning— "The meaning
of morning and/ The mastery of meaning" [italics supplied].
This is not "summer knowledge" but meaning in the old
sense, meaning that means to the self— the self that
holds "mastery" now as before! In the kingdom of poetry
one can not say, "The king is dead, long live the king,"
because it is the same old king who is ascending the
throne. For Schwartz, whatever the degree of salvation
vouchsafed him, it came, always, through poetry and with
the self, as he said, both "falcon and falconer" and
always in control. In "The Kingdom of Poetry" this is
still the case. Faced with Schwartz's eloquent claims of
mystical experience and seership on the one hand, and
this later tribute to poetry on the other, one is hard
put not to point out that, most often, true visionaries
end in silence. Even the logician, Wittgenstein, closed
the "Tractatus" with "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann,
231
daruber muss man schweigen."5
The rest of the poetry is slippage— reinforcement
and admissions. In the lyrical "Holderlin," Schwartz
describes "their voices" as
Having no more meaning than the fullness of music.
Chanting from the pure peaks where success,
Effort and desire are meaningless. (p. 184)
If this is the reinforcing theme, then what is "the mas
tery of meaning" in "The Kingdom of Poetry"? The
admissions follow. Direct statement is used, a seeming
effort, to make clear some of the psychological bases for
the poet's later development. The mask of ecstasy and
inducement is wearily dropped, and a plaintive, public
inspection begun.
The fourth section of this part of the book is
titled, "The Deceptive Present, The Phoenix Year." The
poems selected for this section indicate a spiraling
downward from the manic to the depressive; this takes the
form of a low-key social search or examination which,
briefly sustained, then provides a circumstance from which
the poet can recoil and toward which he can be defensive.
^Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosoph-
icus (London: 1960), p. 189.
232
Schwartz has returned to somewhat the same position he
held in Vaudeville for a Princess. The title of the
section is accurate; before the "Phoenix Year" comes the
"Deceptive Present"; such a description is a fair prepara
tion for the cynicism— for Schwartz it is worldliness—
with which he defends himself in these poems.
"The Foggy, Foggy Blue," which is written to the
beat of "The Foggy Foggy Dew," is a clear expression of
this attitude and, interestingly enough, seems to appeal,
by and large, to most young people. The first stanza
follows:
Mien I was a young man I loved to write poems
And I called a spade a spade
And the only only thing that made me sing
Was to lift the masks at the masquerade.
1 took them off my own face,
I took them off the others too
And the only only wrong in all my song
Was the view that 1 knew what was true.
Truthfully (i), his second stanza admits that he is older
and tireder and "the tasks with the masks are quite try
ing. " He reviews his past when he "tried to be less
starry-eyed" but only became confused, "Forgetting what
was false and what was true." In the final stanza he
reveals that he is now beyond the true and the false. He
has abandoned his search for the truth, the drive to pare
233
away the false or the superfluous. He is giving in to
the situation in which "most falsehoods are true." He
has lost the need to judge, to be "naive and stern." He
is giving up that battle in favor of noncritical affirma
tion.
Let live and believe, I say.
The only only thing is to believe in everything:
(p. 206)
And why?
Because it has occurred to me
That the masks are more true than the faces:
(p. 206)
This can be taken as an insight into the image projec
tions by which people present themselves and receive
others. It is reminiscent of Eliot's "To prepare a face
to meet the faces that you meet.1 '6 It implies that we
live in a world of fictions delivered to us by symbols,
and that the uncovering is merely the exchanging of one
mask for another. The young people see in it a cynical
expression of disappointment. But in the spiral of
Schwartz's progression, it can, on the surface, be taken
to show that he is moving on to a point where he will be
^"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," The Complete
Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York, 1962) , p. 4.
234
willing to drop his defensiveness, to give up the masking
and the unmasking, to go on, albeit wearily, to a new and
saving level of acceptance. But the tone belies this and
the last line, "It's more fun and safer that way!"
implies, in that it is a motion from seriousness to fun,
that once again the poet recognizes the correct (health
ful?) formula, but can not really give in to it any more
than he can treat himself with lightness and gayety. "I
Did Not Know the Spoils of Joy" in the same section has
the same tone of forced gayety; it even ends, "How glad I
am that I exist!” (p. 209), yet it carries the same mes
sage.
But the poem, "The Decepti^£ Present, The Phoenix
Year" (p. 212) adds another association to the word
"deceptive." The present is deceptive because it gives
the impression, for the moment, of existing forever.
All winter the trees had been
Silent soldiers, a vigil of woods, (p. 212)
7
The winter had seemecUforever— "barbed wires against the
ice-white sky.” The poet asks, then, who could have
believed in the spring that the spring will come when all
7
“During December's Death," p. 214, describes the
long wait through the winter.
is "Wet, white, ice, wooden, dulled and dead, brittle or
frozen" (p. 212)? This is the nature of the deceptive
present. Yet there is hope because "The reality of spring
and of birth” is certain to return. And this is the
meaning of "The Phoenix Year." The passing moment seems
eternal and possesses in itself only stasis, but the
Q
year, the cycle, as in other mystical writing, notice
ably Eliot's, promises renewal. Again symbolically, the
winter with its soldiers and barbed wire refers to
Schwartz's defensive, isolated past in which the ego
shored itself up and consumed to protect itself, loveless
and worse, unloving; but the phoenix year, the cycle,
brings a discarding of the defenses and an opening up to
the "green warm opulence of summer,"and the inexhaustible
vitality and immortality of the earth— a new humility for
the poet if it were really accepted but one supposes it
is merely assumed.
In "The Conclusion" he offers this explanation:
8
The year as a cycle is mentioned in detail again
in "May's Truth and May's Falsehood," page 214, and also he
makes use of the conventional symbol for cycle or change
in "The River Was the Emblem of All Beauty: All" on page
228.
236
The furs which love in all its warmth discloses
Become the fires of pride and are betrayed
By those whom love has terrified and pride has made
afraid, (p. 201) [italics supplied]
In the poem, "All the Fruits Had Fallen," the name of
which implies that summer is over and with it "summer
knowledge,” Schwartz reviews his situation:
I wished for the innocence
Of my stars and my stones and my trees
All the brutality and inner sense
A dog and a bird possess
Until, in the dim window glass,
The fog or cloud of my face
Showed me my fear at last! (p. 205)
The last section of the book, "The Phoenix Choir,"
is very short and appears, on the whole, needlessly separ
ated from the prior section. It contains several poems
from previous volumes— one from Genesis, which is here
called "Lincoln" (p. 236), and the well-known "Starlight
Like Intuition Pierced the Twelve," first published in
book form in Vaudeville for a Princess. There are three
more or less prose poems of biblical derivation— "Abra
ham," "Sarah," and "Jacob." These mark no definitive
points of development, but are fond compilations and
restatements of attitudes and insights presented in pre
vious work and commented upon in this study. In three
poems, he reworks his doubts and asserts his hope in the
237
cyclical nature of things: "Once and For All" (p. 222)
confesses that his original loyalty to Apollo and subse
quent default into the ranks of Dionysus (an admission
again of guilt) was an error in the sense that no such
dichotomy exists, and that he has moved on to a position
discovering "the opulance hidden in the dark depths and
glittering heights of reality." (p. 222). "The River
Was the Emblem of All Beauty: All" (p. 228) revivifies
the conventional symbol of the cycle as background to
the poet's pitiful performance in public:
Could they have seen how my
faces were
Bonfires of worship and vigil, blazes of adoration
and hope
— Surely they would have laughed again, renewed
their scorn, (pp. 228-229)
His defensiveness, his paranoia, nags him. But finally,
stone-cold and sober, in one of the last poems of the
book, "The Fear and the Dread of the Mind of Others,"
he writes^.
Knowing their certainty that I was only
A monument, a monster who had fallen in love
With himself alone, how could I have
Told them what was in me, within my heart
trembling and passionate . . .?
Do you hear? Do you see? Do you understand me now,
and how
The words for what is in my heart do not exist?
(pp. 227-228)
CONCLUSION
It is not easy to appraise a contemporary writer of
stature; there are real grounds for the fact that full-
scale appraisals increase in number after a writer's
death. If the critic respects his contemporary who, as in
this case, may be a good poet, he must assume that, in
regard to the experience of his time and place, the poet
has been involved at least as deeply as the critic. Yet
it is the critic's job to conquer, for the more limited
level of expository prose, the meaningfulness of the
poet— covering, indeed, the very complex of experience
which the poet could only fully express in the complete
body of his poetry. To accomplish this for the discur
sive level, the critic must seek a point of transcendency,
a conceptual vantage point, an intellectual angle, the
excellence of which is directly proportionate to its com
prehensiveness, everything else remaining equal. After
the poet dies— when sufficient time has elapsed— such
points of transcendence or inclusion present themselves.
239
They are the gifts of time, of the motion of the culture.
It is often said that an author's death arrests the
change which otherwise continues to occur in his earlier
work through the production of later work, thus affording
the critic a picture which remains comparatively static.
Just as the critic tries to achieve a point of tran
scendency, so the poet reaches for as wide a level of
inclusion as possible. There is a creative crest of the
wave for any particular period or time, one which a
writer must reach and from which he must write if he is
to make a bid for major stature. To reach this point, he
must include the experience of his age; and from this
point almost anything he writes must be of significance.
It is just one, merely a single stance, but from it come
all the comments and corrections of a major writer. Many
perfectly good, minor craftsmen write from other levels,
but the major writer's work develops an ultimate comment
for his time, one which may or may not be agreeable to a
reader, but which, nevertheless, is fundamental.
It is for this reason that Eliot evokes and sustains
so much consideration. And Schwartz, for his time, seemed
to be such a one. So far as comparison is concerned,
Eliot in many ways may be taken as Schwartz's polar
opposite. Eliot believed in God; Schwartz, though he
occasionally said he believed, did not give evidence of
believing even in doubt. Eliot emphasized the impersonal,
and achieved the essence of the personal; Schwartz empha
sized the personal and reached the ultimate in loss of
self; Eliot is the classicist, Schwartz the romantic.
Eliot embraced faith, and made of his belief a structure
for poetry; Schwartz rejected faith, and the rejection
drowned his religious feeling in secularity. Eliot de
veloped an ordered intellectual center (a different affair
from belief) and produced a body of work celebrating or
der, while Schwartz, it seems, avoiding such commitment,
depended on his sensibility and, in the end, produced
work celebrating disorder.
Nevertheless, Schwartz was one of the five best poets
of his generation which included Jarrell, Lowell, Berry
man, and Roethke. But, though his first book gained con
siderable recognition, this was not the case with his
subsequent work. Schwartz gave promise of the depth and
breadth of greatness; he stood on a pinnacle of inclu
siveness and refinement, but something happened; the
tight poetic line, the incisive and striking phrasing of
his early poetry loosened as time passed, grew vague,
241
repetitive, and amorphous. Yet Schwartz thought of him
self as a great poet, and many agreed, at least on the
fact that he had the potential. Wallace Stevens, for
instance, thought he was the most talented of the younger
poets. And so the poetry of Delmore Schwartz stood as an
anomoly, presented several interesting problems which an
analysis beased on a consideration of his work in chrono
logical order has helped to solve.
The corpus of Schwartz's work makes only the slight
est bow to tradition; it is as if competing clarities
invite the reader's rejection on the ground that the
whole carnival of attitudes roams his pages like a group
of nomads— without the architecture of home. No order
but the order of discovery seemed appropriate for handling
a writer who, though refusing to fall easily into a tradi
tion, was too sophisticated to be called primitive. The
clearest, completest, and most conscious method for
handling such a problem appeared to be a straightforward
examination of his books of poetry in the order in which
they were published.
It is foolish to deny that literary clues are not
biographical clues; of course, they are. But many crit
ics have found it helpful to keep the one level separate
242
from the other as much as possible, in the case of
Delmore Schwartz, however, the poet's "position" is
almost his only theme. The very first encounter with the
first poem in his first book brought the author himself,
poorly hidden behind layers of masks, violently into
prominence. For this reason,, theme was emphasized at the
outset. Schwartz's first book. In Dreams Begin Responsi
bilities, begins with the poem "Coriolanus and His
Mother: The Dream of One Performance.1 1 The order of
discovery demanded an answer to the question: why Corio
lanus? A single reading showed the strong identification
of the author with Coriolanus. It only remained to trace
down clue after clue and to use each one as a nail with
which to pin the author to his true persona, Coriolanus.
I say "true" because Schwartz uses a projection of
himself as well in the poem. Therefore, each separate
investigation, each clue, is important and the total has
established, beyond doubt I think, an interesting picture
of certain tendencies in Schwartz himself. What emerged
was the portrait of a narcissist, a perfectionist, an
image-maker, rigid, impenetrable, uncompromising. Now,
on the surface, Schwartz exhibited no such traits, par
ticularly later on in life, but the young man possessed
243
all of them and, of course, more. About his art, Schwartz
was always serious, and a serious young poet must fight
for purity in his work. "Coriolanus and His Mother,"
however, demonstrates almost an obsessive preoccupation
with the theme; Schwartz, in fact, states it explicitly,
there was little need to dig it out. The only digging
that occurred was in the effort to show his identifica
tion with his main character and this was hardly diffi
cult since he refers to Coriolanus as "my twin."
Though the consideration of theme was paramount in
the more or less introductory study of "Coriolanus and
His Mother," the structural device used in the poem— the
same device exploited in his first short story which was
not analyzed here because of its genre— reveals, at this
very beginning of his life as a poet, Schwartz's interest
in defensive masking. He offers the poem as a dream of
the author in which he sees himself attending a perform
ance of a play resembling Shakespeare's Coriolanus and
participating in it and commenting on it. Note the
levels— Schwartz dreaming of himself commenting on him
self commenting. There are personae within personae,
masks within masks. This was the second time this de
fensive, self-conscious split was used in his first book.
244
The device itself pointed up the author's supreme dis
trust , an alertness based on suspicion, and a suspicion
that demanded defense. This is the more or less self-
imposed isolation from which Schwartz issued all his
poems, almost as if they were communiques in the battle
between his selves and the rest of mankind. Bit by bit,
these revelations added up the explanation which seemed,
finally, to account for the direction taken in his later
work.
The second section of In Dreams Begin Responsibili
ties, the eleven poems written, as Schwartz said, "In
Imitation of the Fugue Form," revealed other aspects of
the poet. The basic, fugal subject is on the level of
theme, and the theme is "no solace." Schwartz's frantic
shuttling between the poles of the real and the ideal,good
and evil, acceptance and rejection again demonstrated his
powerful urge to settle into a unified whole but one
which contained everything. He was not satisfied to
submit to the partial which submission to a tradition
seemed to mean to him. other themes that concerned him
were shown to be corollary; they were other windows in
the same house (though the reader's light fell upon them
from different angles at different times). This set of
245
poems takes up, in turn, each aspect of life which, one
way or another, might be considered a solace, and shows
how ineffective it is, specifically, and how illusory is
the general notion of solace. The poet treated love,
freedom of will, length of life, friendship, emotions,
the joys of the body, the strengths of the ego, and com
panionship. None of these distract, says Schwartz, even
from distraction.
In the part of the book devoted to separate lyrics,
the same themes are repeated and others added. The lyrics
are concerned with the power of the past, one's fore
bears; they present Schwartz's own powerful and complex
self-consciousness, his need to set watchers watching
the watchers, and, finally, his basic interest in render
ing the moment-to-moment sense of being-in-the-world.
All of this is the picture of an exacerbated sensibility
momentarily saved by preoccupation with the writing of
poetry. The refuge for Schwartz was in the aesthetic and
not once is this “solace" mentioned in "The Repetitive
Heart," which is eleven poems "In Imitation of a Fugue"
in which he destroys each illusion through which men seek
solace. Schwartz defensively separates himself from a
complete account of his total situation here just as he
does in all his work. He makes himself the viewer, and
the viewer transcends. But, the final problem of the
viewer is never touched or treated and, in the end, both
in his literary world and in the real world, he must lose
for lack of succor. No more than he could submit to
literary tradition could Schwartz accept a single, order
ing belief. His discussion of this is presented in "Dr.
Bergen's Belief," a closet drama that ends this first
volume.
The remaining books brought into greater clarity two
basic problems. How is it that Schwartz, one of whose
basic aims was to offer a sense of being which is a mat
ter of the greatest intimacy and recency, proffers work
which somehow seems dated? And, what brought about the
loosening of his style and the inflation of content so
apparent in his last work? The idea of "focus" helps to
explain the first matter. Study showed that there is a
distance between Schwartz and his object at all times and
these poles were really much further apart than is the
custom today. The theory of focus entails a description
of the shift in the sense of reality since Descartes.
This is a coming together of the subjective and the
objective. Poets, today, write with a shorter focus on
247
the world and hence on their subject matter them they did
heretofore. The shorter the focus, the closer the sub
ject matter until, finally, the emphasis is on the subject
which, in a sense becomes the object. Simply, Schwartz
did not use commensurate means for rendering the sense of
intimacy, means that are available to contemporary poets.
He remained, stylistically, at a Cartesian distance— the
elliptical, the irrational, the abridgment of syntactical
convention, these means and more were never used by
Schwartz, the rationalist.
The second problem which relates to the change in
the quality of his poetry is more closely connected with
his development of themes, and the analysis of these
helped to resolve it. Vaudeville for a Princess finally
revealed itself not so much a bridge between the early
and the later work— though this is, to an extent, the
case— but as a desperate attempt to shore up the author's
last defenses: in it the use of strict form masks the
tendency to overflow or fall apart. It proved to be a
mask of calm and objectivity, and Schwartz even discusses
this matter of donning or stripping off masks in one of
his poems in th’s book. But these defenses could not
contain the fullness of the poet.
In Summer Knowledge the dykes are down and the
world floods Schwartz because the poet knew no limits and
would accept neither the constraint of tradition nor of
belief. As he covered a wider range of reality, it was
natural that his rationalistic mode could express the
inexpressible only by widening the poles of his paradoxes
until the separation produced only the general, the vague,
the amorphous. Schwartz thus moved steadily in the direc
tion of exultant and mystical affirmation expressed in
long, incantatory lines, the content of which is, never
theless, banal. The poems in this last volume demonstrated
not what they appear at first to say, namely that the
author has finally dropped his hostility in favor of
love, but only that he retains his mask until the end.
But now the face of the mask has changed; it implies a
giving-over, an acceptance which the poet knew was a
possible salvation but which, in truth, he could not
accept. This difference between pretense and reality is
apparent in the continued cynicism and the gaseous effu
sions of the poetic line.
The fault, one finally saw, lay in one place and was
there from the beginning. The child, as revealed in the
autobiographical poem. Genesis, suffered, grew to distrust
everything. This accounts for the frantic need for aware
ness upon awareness; this accounts for the necessity of
separateness which was a defense. And it also accounts
for Schwartz's reliance on rational systems at a time
when poets were achieving the very intimacy he sought by
a comparative abandonment of such dependence. Most
significantly damaging, however, was Schwartz's mode of
knowing--consumption, incorporation without direction or
limitation, a natural outgrowth of distrust. He identi
fied everything with himself, and moved to immediate
inclusion. This buttressed his ego even through all his
poetic exorcisms to the contrary.
And so, Schwartz ended having only affirmation to
affirm. Though he ostensibly gave up his distrust, his
poetic style belied this at the very same time that it
S'
revealed a deteriorating poetry.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
250
BIBLIOGRAPHY
General References
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Publications by Delmore Schwartz3 ,
Books
A Season in Hell (translation of Rimbaud). Norfolk,
Conn.: New Directions, 1939; rev. ed., 1940.
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. Norfolk Conn.: New
Directions, 1939. (prose, poetry)
Shenandoah. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941. (play)
Genesis, Book One. New York: New Directions, 1943.
(prose, poetry)
The World Is a Wedding. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions,
1948. (stories)
Vaudeville for a Princess, and Other Poems. New York:
New Directions, 1950. (prose, poetry)
Summer Knowledge: New and Selected Poems, 1938-1958.
Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1959. (poetry)
Successful Love, and Other Stories. New York: Corinth,
1961. (stories)
^Based on the fine bibliography sent to me by
Professor Donald Dike, of the University of Syracuse.
K
254
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"Three Poems," New Directions in Prose and Poetry, 1937.
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255
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Him Thus 'A Privileged Character,'" Partisan Review,
XIV (March-April 1947), 146-49.
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100.
"I Did Not Know the Spoils of Joy; Winter Twilight,
Glowing Black and Gold; On a Sentence by Pascal;
Dusk Shows Us What We Are and Hardly Mean," Partisan
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"The Early Morning Light," Kenyon Review, XII (Spring
1950), 243-45.
"Six Poems: Look, in the Labyrinth of Memory; Cartoons
of Coming Shows Unseen Before; Don't Speak, Remember
Once It Happened, So It May Again; One in a Thousand
Years in the Nights; Today Is Armistice, a Holiday;
Morning Light for One with Too Much Luck," Commentary,
IX (March 1950), 227-28.
"Hope Like the Phoenix Breast Rises Again; My Love, My
Love, My Love, Why Have You Left Me Alone?; Des-
peranto of Willy-Nully; Self-Unsatisfied Runs Every
where; Chaplin Upon the Cliff, Dining Alone; Rumor
and the Whir of Unborn Wings; Heart Flies Up,
Erratic as a Kite; Why Do You Write an Endless
History?; Self-Betrayal Which Is Nothing New;
Twelfth Night, Next Year, a Weekend in Eternity;
True Recognition Is Often Refused," Poetry, LXXVI
(April 1950), 1-9.
"Holderlin; Baudelaire," Partisan Review, XXI (March
1954), 174-5.
"Fulfillment," Art News (annual), XXIV (1955), 90-1
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256
"The Innocence and Windows of Children and Childhood/1
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"Yorick; All of the Fruits Had Fallen," New Republic,
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Mutiny, II (Winter 1958), 17.
"Poem," Partisan Review, XXV (Spring 1958), 225-6.
"The Kingdom of Poetry," Poetry, XCII (May 1958) , 63-6.
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400.
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When I Was Born," Kenyon Review, XX (Summer 1958),
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"Spiders," New Republic, July 6, 1959, p. 18.
"Cupid's Chant," New Republic, July 27, 1959, p. 29.
"The Choir and Music of Solitude and Silence," New Repub
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"Poem: On That Day of Summer, Blue and Gold," New Repub
lic, October 19, 1959, p. 24.
"All Night, All Night," New Republic, March 21, 1960,
p. 18.
"Speaking at Twilight, Singing in the Morning," Prairie
Schooner, XXXIV (Summer 1960), 123-7.
"This Is a Poem I wrote at Night Before the Dawn," New
Republic, October 23, 1961, p. 24.
"Words for a Trumpet Chorale Celebrating the Autumn,"
New Republic, November 13, 1961, p. 12.
258
"Two Lyrics from Kilroy's Carnival, A Masque," Sewanee
Review, LXX (Winter 1962), 12-13.
"Journey of a Poem Compared to All the Sad Variety of
Travel," Kenyon Review. XXIV (Spring 1962), 304.
"Aria (from Kilroy's Carnival)," New Republic, April 23,
1962, p. 26.
"Poem; Remember Midsummer: The Fragrance of Box, of White
Roses," New Republic. July 16, 1962, p. 21.
"Apollo Musagete, Poetry, and the Leader of the Muses,"
Poetry. Cl (October, 1962), 108-11.
"Poem: In the Morning, When It Was Raining," New York
Times, October 27, 1962, p. 24.
"The First Night of Fall and Falling Rain," New York
Times, November 6, 1962, p. 32.
Short Stories
"The Commencement Day Address," New Directions in Prose
and Poetry, 1937. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions,
1937, pp. 231-42.
"In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," New Directions in
Prose and Poetry, 1937. Norfolk, Conn.: New Direc
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"The Statues," Partisan Review, IV (May 1938), 11-18.
"An Argument in 1934," Kenyon Review, IV (Winter 1942),
62-74.
"New Year's Eve," Partisan Review, XII (Summer 1945),
327-44.
"A Bitter Farce," Kenyon Review, VIII (Spring 1946),
245-61.
259
"The Child Is the Meaning of This Life," Partisan Review,
XIV (May-June 1947), 255-77.
"The World Is a Wedding," Partisan Review, XV (March
1948), 279-87.
"The Fabulous Twenty-Dollar Bill," Kenyon Review, XIV
(Summer 1952), 378-405.
"Tales from the Vienna Woods: An Inside Story," Partisan
Review, XX (May 1953), 267-81.
"An American Fairy Tale," Commentary, XXVI (November,
1958) , 420-4.
"The Track Meet," The New Yorker, February 28, 1959, pp.
28-34.
"The Gift," Partisan Review, XXVI (Summer 1959), 453-60.
Essays and Reviews
"The Stars of Joseph Gordon Macleod," Mosaic, I (Spring
1935), 8-17.
"Adroitly Naive" (rev. of Poems by Louis MacNeice),
Poetry, XLVIII (May 1936), 115-17.
"Defective Sincerity," (rev. of Straight or Curly? by
Clifford Dyment), Poetry, L (July 1937), 233-6.
"John Dos Passos and the Whole Truth" (rev. of U.S.A. by
John Dos Passos), Southern Review, IV, no. 2 (1938),
351-67.
Review of The Man With the Blue Guitar, and Other Poems
by Wallace Stevens, Partisan Review, IV (February
1938), 49-52.
"Ezra Pound's Very Useful Labors," Poetry, LI (March
1938), 324-39.
260
Review of Mr. Witt Among the Rebels by Ramon J. Sender,
Common Sense, VII (April 1938), 24.
"Primitivism and Decadence" (rev. of Primitivism and
Decadence by Yvor Winters), Southern Review, III,
no. 3 (1938), 597-614.
"The Critical Method of R. P. Blackmur,” Poetry, XIII
(October 1938), 28-39.
"Ernest Hemingway's Literary Situation," Southern Review,
III, no. 4 (1938), 769-82.
"The Politics of William Butler Yeats" (letter), New
Republic, October 12, 1938, p. 272.
Review of The Oxford Book of Light Verse, ed. by W. H.
Auden, Partisan Review, VI (Winter 1939), pp. 122-23.
"The Two Audens," Kenyon Review, I (Winter 1939), 34-45.
Review of W. C. Williams' Collected Poems; 1906-1938,
Common Sense, VIII (February 1939), 24.
"The Poet as Poet" (on Yeats), Partisan Review, VI
(Spring 1939), 52-59.
"A Great Poem, in English" (rev. of Duino Elegies by
R. M. Rilke, trans. J. B. Leishman), Partisan
Review, VI (Summer 1939), 119-21.
"The Criterion, 1922-1939," Kenyon Review, I (Autumn
1939), 435-39.
"The Enigma of Robinson Jeffers," Poetry, LV (October
1939), 30-8.
"Rimbaud in Our Time," Poetry, LV (December 1939), 148-54.
"Mr. Eliot and Old Possum" (rev. of T. S. Eliot's Old
Possum's Book of Practical Cats), Nation, December
30, 1939, pp. 737-8.
"Poetry and Belief in Thomas Hardy," Southern Review,
VI, no. 1 (1940), 64-77.
261
"The Poetry of Allen Tate" (rev. of Selected Poems by
Allen Tate) Southern Review, V, no. 3 (1940), 419-38.
"The Fiction of William Faulkner," Southern Review, VII,
no. 1 (1941), 145-60.
"Neither Historian nor Critic" (rev. of New England:
Indian Summer by Van Wyck Brooks), Kenyon Review,
III (Winter 1941), 119-23.
"The Isolation of Modem Poetry," Kenyon Review, III
(Spring 1941), 209-20.
"A Man in His Time" (rev. of Dangling Mam by Saul Bellow),
Partisan Review, XI (Summer 1941), 348-50.
"The Writing of Edmund Wilson," Accent, II (Spring 1942),
177-86.
"An Unwritten Book," Southern Review, VII, no. 3 (1942),
471-91.
"Poet's Progress" (rev. of Person, Place, and Thing by
Karl Shapiro), The Nation, January 9, 1943, pp. 63-4.
"Merry-Go-Round of Opinion" (rev. of Brownstone Eclogues
by Conrad Aiken), New Republic, March 1, 1943), pp.
292-3.
"Anywhere Out of The World" (review of T. S. Eliot's
Four Quartets), The Nation, July 24, 1943, pp. 102-3.
"The Shock of Recognition" (rev. of The Shock of Recog
nition by Edmund Wilson), Partisan Review, X (Sep-
tember-October 1943), 439-42.
"The Poetry of Millay" (rev. of Millay's Collected Lyrics),
The Nation, CLVII (December 18, 1943), pp. 735-6.
"The Hero in Russia," (rev. of The Hero in History by
Sidney Hook), Kenyon Review, VI (Winter 1944), 126-
29.
"Under Forty," Contemporary Jewish Record, VII (February
1944), 12-14.
262
"New Writing in Wartime" (rev. of Cross Section by Edwin
Seaver)f The Nation, August 12r 1944, pp. 190-1.
"Delights and Defects of Experience" (rev. of New Direc-
tions, 1944), The Nation, October 21, 1944, pp. 476-
77.
J. H. Goldsmith (pseud.), "The Fear of Literature" (rev.'
of The Shape of Books to Come by J. Donald Adams),
Partisan Review, XII (Winter 1945), 133.
"He Too Has Lived in America" (rev. of The World of
Washington Irving by Van Wyck Brooks), Partisan
Review, XII (Winter 1945), 128-30.
"The Early Joyce" (rev. of Joyce's Portrait and Stephen
Hero), The Nation, January 27, 1945, p. 106.
"T. S. Eliot as the International Hero," Partisan Review,
XII (Spring 1945), 199-206.
"Gertrude Stein's Wars" (rev. of Wars I Have Seen by
Gertrude Stein), The Nation, March 24, 1945, pp.
339-40.
"A Poet and His Prose" (rev. of a selection of Whitman's
prose and poetry). The Nation, September 22, 1945,
pp. 289-90.
"Virginia Woolf's Fiction" (review of Joan Bennett’s
Virginia Woolf: Her Art as a Novelist), The Nation,
October 13, 1945, p. 378.
"Aldous Huxley's Philosophy" (review of Huxley's The
Perennial Philosophy), The Nation, October 27, 1945,
pp. 438-9.
"A Middle Western Anthology" (rev. of an anthology of
the literature of the Middle West), The Nation,
November 3, 1945, pp. 468, 470.
"Karl Shapiro's Poetics" (rev. of Karl Shapiro's Essay on
Rime), The Nation, November 10, 1945, p. 498; also
reply by Shapiro in issue of December 22, pp. 690-3,
and reply to that by Schwartz in same issue.
263
"The Dream from Which No One Wakes" (review of Little
Friend, Little Friend by Randall Jarrell), The
Nation, December 1, 1945, pp. 590-1.
"A Literary Provincial" (on Yvor Winters), Partisan
Review, XIX (Winter 1946), 138-42.
"The Sick City and the Family Romance" (rev. of The
Individual and His Society and The Psychological
Frontiers of Society by Abram Kardener), The Nation,
January 12, 1946, pp. 46-8.
"Wanted: A Literary Consciousness" (rev. of Cross Section
by L. B. Fischer), The Nation, January 19, 1946,
pp. 77-8.
"The Meaningfulness of Absurdity" (rev. of Albert Camus'
Mythe de Sisyphe and Le Malentendu and Caligula),
Partisan Review, XIII (Spring 1946), 246-50.
"Two Chapters from 'The Myth of Sisyphus' by Albert
Camus" (translation), Partisan Review, XIII (Spring
1946) , 188-91.
"The Poetry of Hopkins" (rev. of G. M. Hopkins by the
Kenyon Critics), The Nation, March 23, 1946, pp.
347-48.
"Film Chronicle," Partisan Review, XIII (Summer 1946),
351-2.
"Instructed of Much Mortality: A Note on the Poetry of
John Crowe Ransom," Sewanee Review, LIV (July 1946),
439-48.
"Unpleasant and Important Fact," American Scholar, XV
(October 1946), 553-4.
"The First and Last Question" (rev. of Education of
Modern Man by Sidney Hook), Partisan Review, XIII
(November-December 1946), 595-6.
"An Intolerable Confusion" (rev. of A History of American
Poetry by Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska),
The Nation, December 7, 1946, pp. 660, 662, 664.
'"I Peel Drunk All the Time'" (rev. of Selected Poems of
Kenneth Patchen), The Nation, February 22, 1947,
pp. 220, 222.
"Auden and Stevens" (rev. of Auden's The Age of Anxiety
and Stevens' Transport to Summer), Partisan Review,
XIV (Septerober-October, 1947), 528-32.
"The Noble View" (rev. of The Noble Voice by Mark Van
Doren), Sewanee Review, LV (October-December 1947),
707-9.
"Does Existentialism Still Exist?" Partisan Review, XV
(December 1948), 1361-63.
"Raw Genius, Self-Delusion, and Incantation1 ' (book
review), Partisan Review, XV (December 1948), 1135-6.
"The Literary Dictatorship of T. S. Eliot," Partisan
Review, XVI (February 1949), 119-37.
"Views of a Second Violinist," Partisan Review, XVI
(December 1949), 1250-5.
"The Genius of W. C. Fields" (rev. of W. C. Fields: His
Follies and Fortunes by Robert Lewis Taylor),
Nation, February 11, 1950, pp. 135-6.
"Smile and Grin, Relax and Collapse" (rev. of 55 Short
Stories from the New Yorker), Partisan Review, XVII
(March 1950), 292-6.
"The Life of a Hero" (rev. of D. H. Lawrence by Richard
Aldington), Nation, July 15, 1950, p. 64.
"The Grapes of Crisis," Partisan Review, XVIII (January
1951), 7-15.
"The Dark Night of F. Scott Fitzgerald" (rev. of The Far
Side of Paradise by Arthur Mizener), Nation, Febru
ary 24, 1951, pp. 180-82.
"The Vocation of the Poet in the Modern World," Poetry
LXXXVIII (July 1951), 223-32.
265
"The Fabulous Example of Andre Gide" (rev. of Two Leg
ends: Oedipus and Theseus and The Journals of Andre
Gide), Partisan Review, XVIII (July-August 1951),
459-66.
"The Miraculous Ayme and others" (rev. of Man and Boy
by Wright Morris, The Twilight of the Elephant by
Elio Vittorini, Conjugal Love by Alberto Moravia,
All About H. Hatterr by G. V. Desani, At Swim— Two
Birds by Flann O'Brien, The Watch by Carlo Levi,
The Miraculous Barber by Marcel Ayme), Partisan
Review, XVIII (September-October 1951), 575-81.
"Fiction Chronicle: Dear Uncle James" (rev. of John
O'Hara's Chosen Country, Graham Greene's The End of
the Affair), Partisan Review, XIX (March-April 1952),
234-38.
"Masterpieces as Cartoons," Partisan Review, XIX (July
1952), 461-71.
"Our Country and Our Culture" (part of a symposium),
Partisan Review, XIX (September-October 1952), 593-
97.
"Long After Eden" (rev. of East of Eden by John Steinbeck,
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, Men at
Arms by Evelyn Waugh, Hemlock and After by Angus
Wilson, Testimonies by Patrick O'Brian), Partisan
Review, XIX (November-December 1952), 701-6.
"The Duchess' Red Shoes," Partisan Review, XX (January,
May 1953), 55-73, 365-6.
"A Universal Mind" (rev. of Cezanne by Meyer Schapiro),
Partisan Review, XX (July-August, 1953), 442-3.
"The Dragons of Guilt" (rev. of Brother to Dragons by
R. P. Warren), New Republic, September 14, 1953,
pp. 17-18.
"Truth as Brutality" (rev. of The Present and the Past
by Ivy Compton-Burnett), New Republic, October 19,
1953, pp. 18-19.
266
"The Self Against the Sky" (rev. of Collected Poems by
Conrad Aiken), New Republic, November 2, 1953, pp.
24-25.
"Adventure in America'1 (rev. of The Adventures of Augie
March by Saul Bellow), Partisan Review, XXI (Janu
ary February 1954), 112-15.
"Speaking of Books" (on the popularity of pocketbooks),
New York Times Book Review, January 17, 1954, p. 2.
"In the Orchards of the Imagination" (rev. of Collected
Poems by Wallace Stevens), New Republic, November
1, 1954, pp. 16-18.
"T. S. Eliot's Voice and His Voices," Poetry, LXXXV
(December 1954, January 1955), 1706, 232-42.
"The Fiction of Ernest Hemingway," Perspectives USA,
no. 13 (1955) , 70-88.
Review of the film, Animal Farm, New Republic, January
17, 1955, pp. 22-3.
Film review: Bridges at Toko-Ri, New Republic, January
14, 1955, pp. 28-9.
Film review: The Country Girl, New Republic, April 4,
1955, p. 21.
Film review: Underwater1, Blackboard Jungle, New Republic,
April 11, 1955, pp. 29-30.
Film review: East of Eden, New Republic, April 25, 1955,
p. 22.
"Mary Pickford: The Little Girl in Curls" (rev. of Sun
shine and Shadow by Mary Pickford), New Republic,
June 6, 1955, pp. 17-20.
Film review: The Long Gray Line, Captain Lightfoot,
Untamed, Mambo, New Republic, June 27, 1955, pp.
21-22.
267
"Films— Tv," New Republic, July 18, 1955, pp. 21-22.
Film review: The Seven Year Itch, New Republic, August
8, 1955, pp. 22-23.
"Wallace Stevens— An Appreciation," New Republic, August
22, 1955, pp. 20-22.
"French Taste in American Writing," New Republic,
September 5, 1955, pp. 21-23.
Film review: To Catch a Thief, New Republic, November 28,
1955, pp. 21-22.
J. H. Goldsmith (pseud.), "Paris Letter: The New French
Sense of Reality," Partisan Review, XXIII (Winter
1956), pp. 31-89.
Film review: The Big Knife, New Republic, January 9,
1956, pp. 19-20.
"Omnibus and the Egg-heads" (letter), New Republic,
January 23, 1956, p. 22.
Film review: The Man with the Golden Arm, New Republic,
February 6, 1956, p. 22.
Film review: The Court Jester, New Republic, March 5,
1956, p. 21.
"Graves in Dock— the Case for Modern Poetry," New Repub
lic, March 19, 1956, pp. 20-21.
"Survey of Our National Phenomena," New York Times Maga
zine, April 15, 1956, pp. 28-29, 59-60.
"Guys, Dolls, and Vivian Leigh" (film review), New
Republic, April 23, 1956, p. 20.
"The Mein Who Read Kant in the Bathtub" (rev. of Further
Speculations by T. E. Hulme), New Republic, May 21,
1956, pp. 21-22.
"Ring Lardner: Highbrow in Hiding," The Reporter, August
9, 1956, pp. 52-4.
2TT8—
"The Nightmare of History" (rev. of Ulysses in Nighttown),
New Republic, March 30, 1959, pp. 16-17.
"Novels and the News," New Republic, April 13, 1959, pp.
16-17.
"The Cunning and the Craft of the Unconscious and the
Pre-Conscious" (rev. of Words for the Wind by Theo
dore Roethke), Poetry (XCIV (June 1959), 203-5.
"The Art of Marianne Moore" (rev. of 0 To Be A Dragon),
New Republic, January 4, 1960, p. 19.
"Ezra Pound and History" (rev. of Thrones de los Can-
tares by Ezra Pound), New Republic, February 8, 1960,
pp. 17-19.
"The Traveler's Flight" (rev. of The Age of Happy Prob
lems by Herbert Gold), New York Times Book Review,
July 1, 1962.
"The Terror Is Absolute" (rev. of "An Age of Enormity"
by Isaac Rosenfeld), New York Times Book Review,
August 12, 1962.
Introduction to Turgenev's Fathers & Sons, Harpers
Modem Classics. New York: Harpers, 1951.
Republications of Delmore Schwartz
in Various Collections
Poems
Rodman, Selden, ed. A New Anthology of Modern Poetry.
New York: Random House, 1938.
"For One Who Would Not Take His Life in His
Hands"
Eastman, Max, ed. An Anthology of Famous English and
American Poetry. New York: Scribners, 1939.
"Mentreche il Vento, Come Fa, Si Tace"
u r
Kreymborg, Alfred, ed. An Anthology of American Poetry.
New York: Tudor, rev. ed., 1941.
"The Heavy Bear"
Horizon (London), IX (February, 1944), 87.
"In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave"
Aiken, Conrad, ed. A Comprehensive Anthology of American
Poetry. New York: Modern Library, 1944.
"Mentreche il Vento, Come Fa, Si Tace"
"Socrates' Ghost Must Haunt Me Now"
Benet, William Rose, and Conrad Aiken, eds. An Anthology
of Famouse English and American Poetry. New York:
Modern Library, 1945.
"Socrates' Ghost Must Haunt Me Now"
Williams, Oscar, ed. The War Poets: An Anthology of the
War Poetry of the Twentieth Century. New York:
John Day, 1945.
"For The One Who Would Take Man's Life In His
Hands"
The Partisan Reader: Ten Years of Partisan Review, 1934-
1944: An Anthology. New York: The Dial Press, 1946.
"The Ballad of the Children of the Czar"
Engle, Paul, and Warren Carrier, eds. Reading Modern
Poetry. New York: Scott, Foresman, 1946.
"The Heavy Bear"
"In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave”
Williams, Oscar, ed. A Little Treasury of Great Poetry,
English and American. New York: Scribners, 1947.
"The Heavy Bear"
"In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave"
Williams, Oscar, ed. A Little Treasury of American
Poetry. New York: Scribners, 1948.
"All Clowns Are Masked"
"The Beautiful American Word, Sure"
"Do They Whisper Behind My Back?"
"A Dog Named Ego"
"Father and Son"
"For Rhoda"
270
"For the One Who Would Take Man's Life in His
Hands"
"The Heavy Bear"
"In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave"
Aiken, Conr"^, ed. Twentieth-Century American Poetry.
New York: Modern Library, 1944.
"At This Moment of Time"
"In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave"
"Mentreche il Vento, Come Fa, Si Tace"
"Socrates' Ghost Must Haunt Me Now"
Rodman, Selden, ed. 100 Modern Poems. New York: Pelle
grini and Cudahy, 1949.
"The Ballad of the Children of the Czar"
Ciardi, John, ed. Mid-Century American Poets. New York:
Twayne, 1,950.
"In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave"
"For the One Who Would Take Man's Life in His
Hands"
"A Dog Named Ego, the Snowflakes as Kisses"
"The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me"
"The True, the Good, and the Beautiful"
"The Ballad of the Children of the Czar"
"Starlight Like Intuition Pierced the Twelve"
Husted, Helen, ed. Love Poems of Six Centuries. New
York: Coward-McCann, 1950.
"Mentreche il Vento, Come Fa, Si Tace"
Matthiessen, F. O., ed. The Oxford Book of American
Verse. New York: Oxford, 1950.
"All Clowns Are Masked"
"All of Us Always Turning Away for Solace"
"The Ballet of the Fifth Year"
"For Rhoda"
"Prothalamion"
Untermeyer, Louis, ed. Modern American Poetry. New York:
Harcourt Brace, 7th ed., 1950.
"For Rhoda"
"In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave"
"Let Us Consider Where the Great Men Are"
"Tired and Unhappy You Think of Houses"
271
Williams, Oscar, ed. A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry,
English and American. New York: Scribners, rev.
ed., 1950.
"A Dog Named Ego"
"For Rhoda"
"For The One Who Would Take Man's Life in His
Hands1 1
"The Heavy Bear"
"In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave"
"Socrates' Ghost Must Haunt Me Now"
"Starlight Like Intuition Pierced the Twelve"
"Tired and Unhappy You Think of Houses"
Friar, Kimon, and John Malcolm Brinnin, eds. Modern
Poetry: English and American. New York: Appleton-
Century-Crofts, 1951.
"The Heavy Bear"
"Starlight's Intuitions Pierced the Twelve"
Williams, Oscar, ed. F. T. Palgrave's The Golden Treasury
of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems. New York: New
American Library, 1953.
"In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave"
Rosenthal, M. L., and A. J. M. Smith, eds. Exploring
Poetry. New York: MacMillan, 1955.
"In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave"
Untermeyer, Louis, ed. Modern American and British
Poetry. New York: Harcourt Brace, rev. ed., 1955.
"The Ballet of the Fifth Year"
"For Rhoda"
"For the One Who Would Take Man's Life in His
Hands"
"Let Us Consider Where the Great Men Are"
"Tired and Unhappy You Think of Houses"
Williams, Oscar, ed. The New Pocket Anthology of Ameri
can Verse. New York: Washington Square Press, 1955.
"The Starlight's Intuitions Pierced the Twelve"
"The Heavy Bear"
"In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave"
"Tired and Unhappy You Think of Houses"
"For the One Who Would Take Man's Life in His
Hands"
272
Auden, W. H., ed. The Criterion Book of American Verse.
New York: Criterion, 1956.
"The Beautiful American World, Sure”
"The Heavy Bear"
Elliot, George P., ed. Fifteen Modem American Poets.
New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1956.
"Will You Perhaps"
"Do They Whisper?"
"The Heavy Bear"
"For the One Who Would Take Man's Life in His
Hands"
"Saint, Revolutionist"
"What Is To Be Given"
"In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave"
"Lincoln"
"The Masters of the Heart Touched the Unknown"
"She Was the Girl Within the Picture Frame"
'"One in a Thousand of Years of the Nights'"
"I Wish I Had Great Knowledge or Great Art"
"'There'll Be Others But None So for Me'"
"She Lives with the Furies of Hope and Despair"
"Being Unused to Joyous Consciousness"
"The Morning Light for One With Too Much Luck"
"The Self Unsatisfied Runs Everywhere"
"The Fulfillment"
"The First Morning of the Second World"
Friedman, Albert B., ed. The Viking Book of Poetry of
the English Speaking World. New York: Viking Press,
1956.
"All Clowns Are Masked"
Ausubel, Nathan, and Maryann Ausubel, eds. A Treasury
of Jewish Poetry. New York: Crown, 1957.
"You Are a Jew I (selection from Genesis)
"The Heavy Bear"
"Look, in the Labyrinth of Memory"
"Today Is Armistice, a Holiday"
Cecil, David, and Allen Tate, eds. Modern Verse in
English, 1900-1950. New York: MacMillan, 1958.
"Calmly We Walk Through This April Day"
"The Heavy Bear"
"In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave"
273
Shapiro, Karl, ed. American Poetry (American Literary
Forms series). New York: Crowell, 1960.
"A Dog Named Ego"
"Starlight Like Intuition Pierced the Twelve"
Brooks, Cleanth, and R. P. Warren, eds. Understanding
Poetry. New York: Holt, Rhinehart, Winston, 3rd
ed., 1961.
"The Heavy Bear"
Klemer, D. J., ed. Modern Love Poems. Garden City,
N. Y.: Hanover House, 1961.
"How Strange Love Is in Every State of Conscious
ness"
Poetry in Crystal by Steuben Glass. New York: Spiral
Press, 1963.
"Aria" (from Kilroy's Carnival)
The Modern Poets" An American-British Anthology. New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1963.
"The Heavy Bear"
"Baudelaire"
"The Ballet of the Fifth Year"
Stories
Best American Short Stories of 1943. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1944.
"An Argument in 1934"
Partisan Reader: Ten Years of the Partisan Review, 1934-
1944. New York: Dial Press, 1946.
"America! America!"
Swallow, Allan, ed. Anchor in the Sea: An Anthology of
Psychological Fiction. New York: Morrow, 1947.
"In Dreams Begin Responsibilities"
Ribalow, Harold, ed. This Land, These People. New York:
Beechurst, 1950.
"A Bitter Farce"
27T
Schorer, Mark, ed. The Story; A Critical Anthology,
Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1950.
"In Dreams Begin Responsibilities"
New Directions in Prose and Poetry, 1953. Norfolk, Conn.:
New Directions, 1953.
"The Fabulous Twenty-Dollar Bill"
Ribalow, Harold, ed. A Treasury of American Jewish
Stories. New York: Yoseloff, 1958.
"A Bitter Farce"
The Partisan Review Anthology. New York: Holt, Rhinehart,
Winston, 1962.
"America! America!"
Essays
New Directions in Prose and Poetry, 1941. Norfolk, Conn.:
New Directions, 1941.
"The Isolation of Modern Poetry"
Quinn, Kerker, and Charles Shattuck, eds. Accent Anthol
ogy: Selections from Accent, A Quarterly of New
Literature, 1940-1945. New York: Harcourt Brace,
1946.
"The Criticism of Edmund Wilson:
Unger, Leonard, ed. T. S. Eliot: A Selected Critique.
New York: Rhinehart, 1948.
"T. S. Eliot as the International Hero" (ex
cerpt)
Stallman, R. W., ed. Critiques and Essays in Criticism,
1920-1948. New York: Ronald Press, 1949.
"Poetry and Belief in Thomas Hardy"
Hall, James, and Martin Steinmann, eds. The Permanence
of Yeats: : Selected Criticism. New York: MacMillan,
1950.
"An Unwritten Book" *
McCafferyr J. K. M., ed. Ernest Hemingway, the Man and
His Work. New York; World, 1950.
"Ernest Hemingway's Literary Situation"
Hansom, John Crowe, ed. Kenyon Critics: Studies in
Modern Literature. New York: World, 1951.
"Neither Historian Nor Critic"
Institute for Religious and Social Studies. Spiritual
Problems in Contemporary Literature. New York:
Harper, 1952.
"The Vocation of the Poet in the Modern World"
Aldridge, J. w., ed. Critiques and Essays on Modern
Fiction, 1920-1951. New York: Ronald Press, 1952.
"John Dos Passos and the Whole Truth"
Richman, Robert, ed. The Arts at Mid-Century. New York:
Horizon, 1954.
"Recent Literary Criticism"
Rahv, Phillip, ed. Literature in America. New York:
Meridian, 1957.
"T. S. Eliot as the International Hero"
Beal, R. S., and Korg, Jacob, eds. Thought in Prose.
Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1958.
"Masterpieces as Cartoons"
Howe, Irving, ed. Modern Literary Criticism. New York:
Beacon, 1958.
"Poetry and Belief in Thomas Hardy"
Davis, E. R., and W. C. Hummel, eds. Readings for Opin
ions . Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1960.
"Masterpieces as Cartoons"
Zaubel, Morton D., ed. Literary Opinion in America. New
York: Harper, 3rd ed., 1962. Vol. II.
"The Literary Dictatorship of T. S. Eliot"
Guerard, Albert J., ed. Hardy: A Collection of Critical
Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall,
1963.
"Poetry and Belief in Thomas Hardy"
276
Selected Criticism of Delmore Schwartz's
Work
0'Donnell, G. M. "Delmore Schwartz's Achievement"
Poetry, LIV (May 1939), 105-8.
Fisk, W. "Among the Younger Poets," Saturday Review,
April 11, 1942, p. 34.
Alsterlund, B. "Two Young Poets" George Barker and
Delmore Schwartz," Wilson Library Bulletin, XVI
(June 1942), 790 ff.
Van Doren, Mark. "Music of a Mind," in The Private
Reader; Selected Articles and Reviews. New York:
Henry Holt, 1942.
Benet, William Rose. "The Season's Poetry," Saturday
Review, October 16, 1943, pp. 23-24, 64.
Greenberg, M., and Politzer, Heinz. "Two Worlds of
Delmore Schwartz"; "Lucifer in Brooklyn," Commentary,
X (December 1950) 561-8.
Fitts, Dudley. "Three Brilliants," Saturday Review,
July 21, 1951, p. 23.
Kenner, R., and W. V. O'Connor, "Two Views of Vaudeville
for a Princess," Poetry, LIX (October 1951), 50-3,
55-9.
Matthiessen, F. O. "New York Childhood," in Responsibil
ities of the Critic, selected by John Rackliffe.
New York; Oxford, 1952.
Chapin, K. G. "The Man He Chose to Be," New Republic,
November 9, 1959, pp. 24-6.
Strickhausen, H. "Extensions in Language," Poetry, XCV
(February 1960), 300-3.
Rosenthal, M. L. "Deep in the Unfriendly City," Nation,
June 11, 1960, pp. 515-16.
277
Nyren, Dorothy, ed. "Delmore Schwartz," in A Library of
Literary Criticism. New York: Ungar, 1960.
Bonham, Sister M. Hilda. "Delmore Schwartz: An Idea of
the World," Renascence, XIII (1961), 132-35.
Flint, R. W. "The Stories of Delmore Schwartz," Com
mentary, XXXIII (April 1962), 336-9.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Deutsch, Robert Harmon (author)

Core Title The Poetry Of Delmore Schwartz

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Lecky, Eleazer (committee chair), Schulz, Max F. (committee member), Stahl, Herbert M. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-649424

Unique identifier UC11360935

Identifier 6905047.pdf (filename),usctheses-c18-649424 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 6905047.pdf

Dmrecord 649424

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Deutsch, Robert Harmon

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA