Delmore Schwartz

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Delmore Schwartz (8 December 1913 – 11 July 1966) was an American poet and short story writer from Brooklyn, New York.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Published works 3 Trivia 4 References 5 External links

[edit] Biography

Schwartz was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His parents separated when he was nine, and their divorce had a profound effect on him.

Schwartz spent time at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin before finally graduating from New York University in 1935. Soon after graduation, he made his parents' disastrous marriage the subject of his most famous short story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" which was published in 1937 in the first issue of Partisan Review.^[1] This and other short stories and poems were collected and released in his first book, under the same name (1938). (The story was later republished in the collection In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories (1978).) This first work was well received, and made him a well-known figure in New York intellectual circles. His work received praise from some of the most respected people in literature, and he was considered one of the most gifted writers of his generation.

In 1937, he also married his first wife, a book reviewer for Partisan Review, Gertrude Buckman, whom he divorced after six years.

For the next couple of decades, he continued to publish stories, poems and plays, and edited the Partisan Review from 1943 to 1955 as well as The New Republic. In 1948, he married the much younger novelist, Elizabeth Pollett. This relationship also ended in divorce.

In 1959, he became the youngest-ever recipient of the Bollingen Prize, awarded for a collection of poetry he published that year, Summer Knowledge: New and Selected Poems. His poetry differed in many respects from his stories in that it was not especially autobiographical and was much more philosophical. His verse would also become increasingly abstract in his later years. He taught creative writing at six different universities, including Syracuse, Princeton, and Kenyon College.

In addition to being known as a gifted writer, Schwartz was considered a great conversationalist and spent much time entertaining friends at the White Horse Tavern in New York City.

Much of Schwartz's work is notable for its philosophical and deeply meditative nature, and the literary critic, R.W. Flint, wrote that Schwartz's stories were, "the definitive portrait of the Jewish middle class in New York during the Depression."^[2]

He was unable to repeat or build on his early successes later in life as a result of alcoholism and mental illness, and his last years were spent in reclusion at the Hotel Marlon in New York City (this downward spiral following his initial success formed the basis for Saul Bellow's novel Humboldt's Gift (1975). In fact, Schwartz was so isolated from the rest of the world that when he died on July 11, 1966 at age 53, two days passed before hotel management discovered his body.

Schwartz was interred at Cedar Park Cemetery, in Emerson, New Jersey. ^[3]

[edit] Published works

• In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938), a collection of short stories and poems
• Shenandoah (1941), a verse play
• Genesis (1943), a prose poem about the growth of a human being
• World Is a Wedding (1948), a collection of short stories
• Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems (1950)
• Summer Knowledge: New and Selected Poems (1959)
• Successful Love and Other Stories (1961)
• In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories (1978), a short story collection

Published posthumously:

• Selected Essays (1970, ed. Donald Dike, David Zucker)
• Letters of Delmore Schwartz (1984, ed. Robert Phillips)
• The Ego Is Always at the Wheel: Bagatelles (1986, ed. Robert Phillips), a collection of humorously whimsical short essays
• Last and Lost Poems (1989, ed. New Directions Publishing)

[edit] Trivia

• The last episode of the TV show My So-Called Life was named "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities."

• In the U2 song "Acrobat (song)", Bono references "In Dreams Begin Responsibilites" in the lyric.

• Schwartz had the rock star Lou Reed as one of his students at Syracuse University and reportedly told Reed at one point, "You can write—and if you ever sell out and there's a Heaven from which you can be haunted, I'll haunt you."^[4] He attended Schwartz's funeral in 1966 and dedicated several songs to his mentor (most notably "European Son" from The Velvet Underground and Nico and "My House" from The Blue Mask).

• In the film Star Trek: Generations, while conversing with Captain Picard, Dr. Tolian Soran uses the line "...time is the fire in which we burn", which is in the poem "Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day".

• Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum's collection Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons includes an essay titled "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut"

• The title of his story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" came from the Irish poet William Butler Yeats' 1914 volume of poems Responsibilities, which has an epigraph "In dreams begins responsibility," attributed to an "Old play."

• John Berryman dedicated his book His Toy, His Dream, His Rest "to the sacred memory of Delmore Schwartz" and wrote 12 elegiac poems in Schwartz's honor in this book.^[5]

• The Delmore effect, a term in psychology, occurs when attention is directed toward low priority goals rather than more pressing ones, and the term was derived from Delmore Schwartz since, according to Standford's psych department, Schwartz had a pattern of this type of behavior.^[6]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Delmore Schwartz

• Delmore Schwartz Papers at Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
• Delmore Schwartz-The Academy of American Poets
• Arguing the World a PBS documentary
• 64 Poems by Delmore Schwartz