“The Land of the Old World Failure and the New World Success”: Genesis and “America! America!”

Abstract

As early as August 1941, Schwartz wrote to Laughlin announcing, “I am now, I think, the poet of the Atlantic, of the Atlantic migration, which made America” (DS & JL Letters, 149). He was, by this stage, well advanced in drafting the long narrative poem, Genesis, that he believed would secure his reputation and make him famous. Only the first of its three projected books was published, however, meeting a lukewarm—though by no means wholly negative—reception despite Schwartz’s efforts to have it reviewed by critics he knew would be sympathetic. Steeped, as ever, in literary and philosophical reference, and following “Coriolanus and His Mother” in boasting an audience of ghosts to offer Marxist and Freudian analyses of the story proper, Genesis was never likely to “obsess the nation” (DS & JL Letters, 89) as Schwartz had hoped it might, even had it not been published in the middle of the Second World War. Many admirers of Schwartz’s first book found the sprawl and prolixity of Genesis aesthetically disappointing too. As Ashbery maintains, however—in a way that brings to mind Catherine Fitzpatrick’s argument that Schwartz’s best work often represents “a poetry of failure”— “it fails on a lavish scale.”¹ If we accept this judgment, the poem may all the same be a more important failure than has yet been acknowledged.