Abstract
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities begins with an allusion that positions Schwartz’s contemporary American moment within the wider context of the history of Western civilization. The book’s personal dedication, “For Gertrude,” is followed by an epigraph, “animula, vagula, blandula … ,” the first words of a lyric composed by the Emperor Hadrian on his deathbed.1 They gesture forward in the collection to Schwartz’s poem “Prothalamion,” which has as its own epigraph a translation of Hadrian’s lyric by the Scottish poet Joseph Gordon MacLeod: “little soul, little flirting, / little perverse one” (IDBR, 105). They also evoke Eliot’s “Animula,” one of the Ariel Poems of 1927. Eliot’s meditation on “The heavy burden of the growing soul” gives Schwartz the cue for a book replete with images of labor and carrying. The youthful soul in Eliot’s poem “Confounds the actual and the fanciful”; as it grows, it stalls in the face of “The pain of living and the drug of dreams / … Fearing the warm reality, the offered good” (Eliot, CPP, 107).2 This difficulty of accepting the disparity between dreams and actuality—and of knowing which is which—underlies Schwartz’s entire corpus, but especially In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. The prompts for Schwartz’s speculations on the topic are often personal and immediate, and include his family background and his uneasy hopes for his marriage. His simultaneous evocation of Eliot and Hadrian before the book proper has even begun creates a broad historical—and transatlantic—canvas against which to address these concerns.
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Notes
Richard J. Finneran, ed., The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume One: The Poems (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983; 2nd ed., 1991), 100. Finneran believes that the epigraph “might well have been written by Yeats [himself], possibly with the assistance of Ezra Pound” (636).
Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 120.
Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2.
Cited in Richard McDougall, Delmore Schwartz (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1974), 20.
Delmore Schwartz, “Poet’s Progress: Review of Person, Place and Thing by Karl Shapiro,” Nation, January 9, 1943, 63–64.
Delmore Schwartz, “Anywhere Out of the World: Review of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets,” Nation, July 24, 1943, 102.
Edward Ford points this out in A Reevaluation of the Works of American Writer Delmore Schwartz, 1913–1966, 2. See also Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcools ed. Garnet Rees (London: Athlone, 1975).
Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 50.
Hart Crane, Complete Poems and Selected Letters, ed. Langdon Hammer (New York: Library of America, 2006), 44
William Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up when I Behold,” The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 246.
Plato, The Republic, trans. R. E. Allen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 329.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1937),” in Illuminations ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999), 229. Schwartz would not himself have read Benjamin, though he may have become aware of him later in his life through Hannah Arendt. However, as Elisa New has argued, “Schwartz’s attention to mass culture puts him in intellectual relationship with thinkers like Benjamin, Adorno and Bloch,” his elder contemporaries. New further suggests that “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” “may be read to gloss one another: Schwartz dramatizes Benjamin; Benjamin lends theoretical sinew to Schwartz” (Elisa New, “Reconsidering Delmore Schwartz,” Prooftexts 5, no. 3 [September 1985]: 252).
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2003), 155.
Laurence Goldstein, The American Poet at the Movies: A Critical History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 99.
See Matthew Arnold, The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott, 1965; ed. Miriam Allott, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1979), 257.
See Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made There (1976) (London: Phoenix, 2000), 166.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 443.
Schwartz may not have read Heidegger in the original German, but knew about him from his former tutor at NYU, Sidney Hook, one of the first American scholars to write about him (albeit skeptically). See Martin Woessner, Heidegger in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 26–30. In a 1944 journal entry Schwartz accuses Heidegger of overemphasizing one emotion (anxiety) to the exclusion of others such as desire and gratification (Portrait of Delmore: Journals and Notes of Delmore Schwartz: 1939–1959, ed. Elizabeth Pollet [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986], 247).
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929), corrected ed., ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1978), II. ii. 64.
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© 2014 Alex Runchman
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Runchman, A. (2014). In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: “The Egocentric Predicament”. In: Delmore Schwartz. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137394385_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137394385_3
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