The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz

Edited by Ben Mazer

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2024

Given the penchant of editors for bombast and overstaying their welcomes, it’s something of a miracle that the unsigned Introduction to the hefty new Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz from Farrar, Straus and Giroux is only four pages long. It’s been an astonishing fifty years since James Atlas’s great biography of Schwartz; that creates an inviting void that should be irresistible to editorial know-it-alls. But instead, readers get a brisk, almost businesslike overview of Schwartz’s sad, thwarted life. 

The Introduction reminds readers that the critic Dwight Macdonald once said “nobody ever called him Scwhartz” and then proceeds to lay out the basic of Schwartz’s life: born in Brooklyn in 1913, a critically praised writer by 1936, hugely hyped for his 1937 story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, then roughly 30 years of an almost-uninterrupted downward spiral of his “worsted soul”: critical failures, deepening alcohol and pill addiction, a thinning crowd of friends, a few mercy-hires, and finally an unnoticed death in a Manhattan boardinghouse. This is doubtless wise; there’s no competing with that Atlas biography, after all, and the focus of this big new volume is rightly on Schwartz’s verse, including an entire section of previously unpublished works. 

It’s a generous, pleasantly hefty volume, and there’s no arguing that Schwartz has deserved it for a long time, but there are two dangers that always hover around this kind of endeavor. The first is unavoidable, alas: these big complete collections can provoke sludgy rivers of commentary from the critics of the day (amplified by the condescension that always leaps to the keyboards of the timid when the subject is an all-around screwup like Scwhartz). The second is less predictable: these big collections can provoke their editors to over-claim. 

Ben Mazer, thankfully, doesn’t do much over-claiming. True, he occasionally claims that there are “good things” in some of the later creative productions (always tricky when the timeline is producing these works in a junk-haze of barbiturates and alcohol). And at a couple of points he indulges in a bit of dodgy equivocation, some of it admittedly necessitated by Schwartz himself, most notably with something like his weirdly wonderful quasi-translation of Rimbaud’s “A Season in Hell”: “In this edition it is categorized as original poetry,” this edition tells us, “for it is for original poetry that we sometimes read translations, and it is as original poetry that this stimulating translation has its greatest value.”

Mostly, of course, this collection is about the poetry, although there’s some prose as well, channeling the author’s inimitable (or maybe all too imitable) combination of free-wheeling egotism and a critical reflex that even the author’s titanic efforts at self-destruction couldn’t ever quite extinguish, as in a wonderful throwaway line from his Reader’s Prefacer to his 1943 “Genesis: Book One”:

I have no wish to emulate Swinburne, but rather the “morbid pedestrianism” of such poets as Donne and Hardy, Webster and Wordsworth. The diction of this deliberate flatness — and the heavy accent and the slowness — is an effort to declare the miraculous character of daily life and ordinary speech.

Whether or not the vast amount of verse in this book often or uncomplicatedly reflects any kind of diction of deliberate flatness will naturally be up to readers. Here they get the great body of the work, and they’ll just have to endure the editorial know-it-alls. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News