Abstract
In his introduction to Last & Lost Poems, Robert Phillips responds to Berryman’s lament that Schwartz’s “lovely work” did not improve by implying that to use such baldly qualitative language (albeit in an elegy, not an evaluative essay or review) is critically lazy. “His poetry did not, in fact, ‘improve,’” writes Philips. “It became different. Few readers have been willing to examine these differences, to find merit in the later work” (LL, “Foreword,” xiii). Phillips is not wrong to draw attention to Schwartz’s “enormous stylistic change of direction” (xv), but this should not conceal a real continuity between early and later works. There are thematic and even stylistic similarities, to the extent that Douglas Dunn can read a poem such as “Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon along the Seine” as “a summation of virtually everything Schwartz had been endeavouring to express from the very beginning.”1
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Notes
Delmore Schwartz, “Introduction,” What Is to Be Given: Selected Poems by Delmore Schwartz (Manchester: Carcanet, 1976), viii.
John Hollander, “Poetry Chronicle,” Partisan Review (Spring 1960): 368. Laurence Goldstein, in his discussion of Schwartz’s late poem “Love and Marilyn Monroe,” also evokes Smart, suggesting that Schwartz’s form is a means of identifying himself with a poet who was confronting insanity (Goldstein, The American Poet at the Movies 11). Schwartz himself, in a scrawled manuscript, describes Smart as “the poor mad poet (crazy as a posse of foxes)” (Delmore Schwartz Papers, Box 4, Folder 263).
Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 136–137.
John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London: Longman, 1968), 2nd ed. (1997), 167–170.
Harold Bloom, “Introduction,” in American Religious Poems, ed. Harold Bloom and Jesse Zuba (New York: Library of America, 2006), xxv, xxvii.
John Milton, “Samson Agonistes,” in Complete Shorter Poems ed. John Carey (London: Longman, 1968; 2nd ed. 1997), II. 1687–1707, 411–412.
Meyer Schapiro, “Seurat,” in Modern Art: 19th & 20th Centuries (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978), 101.
Richard A. Johnson, “Summer Knowledge, Hard Hours,” The Sewanee Review$176, no. 4 (Autumn 1968): 684.
See Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994), 186.
Max Brod noted that Kafka often liked to quote Flaubert’s remark, which the unmarried French novelist is reputed to have made on visiting a bourgeois family. See, for example, Ronald D. Gray, Franz Kafka (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 53.
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© 2014 Alex Runchman
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Runchman, A. (2014). Summer Knowledge: “Infinite Belief in Infinite Hope”. In: Delmore Schwartz. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137394385_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137394385_6
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