Inconclusible Desire—The Doubling of Delmore Schwartz

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Inconclusible Desire—The Doublingof Delmore SchwartzP HI L LI P L. BE A RD*

With the 1938 publication of In Dream Begin Responsibilities and for at least two decades

after, Delmore Schwartz was regarded as one of the major American poets. He is now

largely forgotten; I explain his career not so much in terms of biography, which is fairly

well-known, but by reevaluating the poetry itself for signs of tension, crisis, and sea-

change, and I especially try, without forced “eurekas” of reading, to illuminate what is yet

valuable in his lyric poetry.

The paper thus has three parts: a review of Schwartz’ reputation, a review of the crises

in the poetry itself, and a consideration of what remains best in Schwartz. The term

“Doubling” in the title comes from the philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s reading of Freud in

Freud and Philosophy: as a dream image may be read (a) to expand the domain of reason,

or (b) regressively, so Schwartz’ poetic work points in two directions, toward an

idiosyncratic, analytical verse, and toward a repressive, awkwardly sublime style that

dominated the end of his career.

Delmore Schwartz’s afterimage, as made by the combined elegiac forces of rumor and

poetry, suggests a Baudelarian outsider in a strong but aimless stride in a darkening city.

The image is a distortion, but let us revisit some sources: in Robert Lowell’s early poem

“To Delmore Schwartz,” the two poets drink and talk away a night, themselves, their

friends, and history; they finish the night by jabbing the foot of a stuffed duck into

an empty bottle of gin, an absurdist sculptural effort overseen by the burning gaze of

a portrait of Coleridge. Dissolute, romantic resonances multiply in Lowell’s poem

as Schwartz intentionally misquotes the Wordsworth of “Resolution and Independence”

by saying, “we poets in our youth begin in sadness;/ thereof in the end come despondency

and madness.”1 In 1966, the year of Schwartz’ death at 53, John Berryman writes of the

novice Schwartz in elegies included in The Dream Songs: “Flagrant his young male beauty,

thick his mind with lore and passionate,” and of the later Schwartz, “He hid his gift in

the center of Manhattan,/ without a girl, in cheap hotels, so disturbed on the street

friends avoided him.”2 Add to these portraits of beauty and dissolution the odd note that

Schwartz taught an admiring Lou Reed at Syracuse University, and the tormented

outsider-poet startlingly drifts into focus at the edge of rock‘n’roll history.

*Phillip L. Beard, Auburn University, Auburn, AL 36830, USA1Robert Lowell. Life Studies (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1959).2John Berryman. The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969).

Literary Imagination, pp. 1–16

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The distortions of rumor are slight reason to revisit his work, as to correct them

historically only takes a moment; my effort here is more to expand the critical record on

Schwartz’s poetry itself. The Schwartz of rumor and elegy is, however, a dialectical

extension of the Schwartz one finds in his own words: for the traditionalist was an

outsider, and the poet seeking sublimation was a poet of desire; the poet who echoed the

cool cadences of later T.S. Eliot was also a translator of Rimbaud’s fiery Une Saison En

Enfer; the poet who studiously repressed personal details in his poems, as if in keeping

with an academic paradigm, was an advocate for an intellectual nonconformity in

alternative to the New Criticism. Schwartz was a poet of doubling in the psychoanalytical

sense of a symbol’s division into dialectical possibilities. His career considered as a whole

points in two directions, like a dream image read by Freud, toward a realistic compromise

of reason and eros, and toward regressive calamity. Curiously, it is his earlier poetry that

presents more peace with contingency, in imaginative compromises of desires and ideals,

but his later work often strains to conjure rhapsody out of abstraction, and so seems

regressive. Out of these tensions one can sense that the personality he is famous for in

rumor’s retrospect, the outsider, while rarely in evidence in his poetry, is still its harmonic

epiphenomenon.At times the tensions in his verse define an oedipal struggle for identity.

An internal authority was alert to this; in an early poem called “Father and Son” the

father, who had seemed ineffectual and Polonius-like at the outset of the poem, changes

by the end, like a moon swept of clouds, into a brighter, colder figure saying starkly, “be

guilty of yourself in the full looking-glass.” But over the course of his career, Schwartz

struggled with this mandate. The short answer as to why Schwartz is now little read is that

he became too sublime. That is, in later verse, he sublimated his experience into

abstractions and into echoes of other poets he admired. But at his best, Schwartz was a

psychoanalytical poet, with the voice of an analyst, rather than a hero, of experience—one

believing not in grand triumphs of selfhood or in the translucency of language as a

window upon truth, but in limited but energetic correspondences of the ego, reason, and

language in interpretations of symbols of desire. As Ricoeur paraphrases Freudian

analysis, so proceeds much of Schwartz’ poetry, in reflection: a process involving both

meditation and suspicion. Ricoeur says, “It is by reflection that the ego recaptures itself

in the mirrors of its objects, works, and desires--.”3 Meditating on the span of nearly

a quarter century from his birth to 1937, Schwartz in “Calmly We Walk through

This April Day” describes various losses, including his father’s death, in the dizzying

momentum of recent history. His perpetual recommitment to temporal particularity

counterpoints a desire to write cosmic justifications or theodicies (he here identifies

this desire with adolescent ambition, as if a too grandly wished reconciliation is

regressive):

What is the self amid this blaze?

What am I now that I was then

Which I shall suffer and act again,

The theodicy I wrote in my high school days,

Restored all life from infancy [. . .] ?

Each minute bursts in the burning room

3Paul Ricoeur. Freud and Philosophy; an Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1970), 42–3.

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The great globe reels in the solar fire,

Spinning the trivial and unique away.

(How all things flash! How all things flare!)

What am I now that I was then?

May memory restore again and again

The smallest color of the smallest day:

Time is the school in which we learn.

Time is the fire in which we burn.4

Schwartz thus could write lyrics that remind us that analysis and verse, often scat-

tered into philosophical archipelagoes by M.F.A. and PhD programs, are alienated to

the impoverishment of both. The following analysis focuses on Schwartz’ maverick

intelligence as overburdened with Freudian challenges; such stultification was not a

Freudian prescription, but a potential result of Schwartz’ sense of desire’s confines.

(The patience I ask of the reader is that the analysis of Schwartz’ most idiosyncratic and

successful early style comes at the essay’s end.)

Schwartz’ reflective process on the whole was more Apollinian than Dionysian; he was

less romantic in personality and literary content than the images in the Lowell and

Berryman poems suggest, and his literary descent was not simply the fable-like fall of the

electrical youth into dissolute obscurity, but an intellectual play or contest of traditions

within his poetry itself. These tensions exist from his earliest published verse on to the

end. His work gave promise of a heady synthesis, as he occasionally combined unsenti-

mental judgments of self and society, powerful feelings phrased idiosyncratically, and an

explicitly Freudian epistemology of desire. His achievement peaked in his first volume,

1938’s In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, in verse that wrestled with philosophy and

psychoanalysis like confirming angels (the title derives from a motto Yeats attributed

simply to an “Old Play” in Responsibilities of 1914).

Mixing symboliste style and critical verve, he became the target of high praise; in 1938,

Poetry Magazine said of his debut, “no first book of this decade has been more

authoritative or more significant than this one.”5 His selected poems, called Summer

Knowledge, made Schwartz the youngest poet to win the Bollingen prize in 1959, as he

bested Lowell’s Life Studies in the competition. Retrospectively, Irving Howe said

Schwartz was “the poet of the historical moment quite as Auden was in England”

(Last and Lost, xiv). More than a decade after Schwartz’ death, John Ashbery spoke of

Schwartz as “one of the major twentieth-century American poets” (Last and Lost jacket

note).6 Today, as Adam Kirsch has recently pointed out, Schwartz the poet is largely

forgotten.7 This disintegration of reputation may be caused by Schwartz’ frequent

habit to echo various mentors, a habit that expanded as the career developed.

Louise Bogan wrote a qualified appreciation of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities for

The Nation, concluding presciently that it was occasionally difficult, amid echoes of

4Delmore Schwartz. Selected Poems (1938–1958); Summer Knowledge (New York: New Directions, 1967).5George Marion O’Donnell. “Delmore Schwartz’ Achievement.” Poetry 54 (1938), 105.6Delmore Schwartz. Last and Lost Poems of Delmore Schwartz, ed. Robert Phillips (New York: Vanguard, 1979).7Adam Kirsch. The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets

(Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath)

(New York: Norton, 2005).

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Yeats, Kafka, Stevens, and Joyce, “to get down to the young writer, to hear, in this

instance, something of Delmore Schwartz.”8

Getting down to Schwartz means at this point an energetic evaluation of the tensions

at work in his verse, and there is no better guide for this work than Freud. Freud is like a

masked Tiresias within Schwartz’ opus; a figure who both knows the tale’s fundamental

symbols and who could serve as its moralist. As a poet showing an integral, not just

a superficial or scholastic interest in Freudian thought, Schwartz has, in his first book,

a contingent, playfully suspicious view of language, a view of consciousness and identity

as ill-fit to the reach of desire, and of selfhood as vexed by history. And he was possessed

of an oedipal concept of individual and social histories and had a psychoanalytical sense

of desire as “inconclusible,” in the Freudian sense—as a desire for an archaic, absolute

comfort, always to be met by mediated compromises in actuality. Though he intermit-

tently invoked the unconscious, especially in negative phrasing that described the narrow

bandwidth of actual self-awareness, his poetry lacks a decisive confrontation with this

concept. He invokes its profound influence and then neither deciphers its representatives

nor dismisses the idea outright. Certainly, he may be forgiven for slipping at this

challenge to be an analyst in verse, as reading the unconscious in its symbols, not just

noting its apparent influence in thought, is the black hole of Freudian work: what is

truly unconscious is unknown, and where reason aquires its hermeneutical authority is a

vexed question. Still, Schwartz was yet not a poet who had to be either a connoisseur of

Platonic reason, with its unencumbered access to Truth, or an advocate of Freudian

hermeneutical suspicion, putting all truths into question. There were dialectical paths

that Schwartz mapped out early on, pursued with some success, but he left them

underexplored, even though they seemed germane to his talent and capable of conjuring

enthusiasm within conflict. After working through the thematic and stylistic conflicts

that define the career, I will review several of these “dialectical” poems toward the end

of the essay.

Freudian and idealist impulses contend like strains of baroque counterpoint in the

larger fugue of Schwartz’ verse, and if a harmonious synthesis is incomplete, perhaps this

drama of failure, in which the symbols he chooses only approximate, but will not

incarnate, the meaning of his experience, is nearly universal. One may restate this in

emphasis: his failure is that of a peculiar late modernist, but it is a type of experience,

of alienation in language and in traditions given to and taken by him, that is perhaps

a given of intellectual life. When Schwartz says, “I am a book I neither read nor wrote,”

we are likely to recognize ourselves in language strange to us yet apt.

That phrase comes from and gives the title to a relatively late poem in which Schwartz’

virtues and faults are both on display. The poem is also an ideal introduction to

the double variety of alienation that Schwartz often describes: first, explicitly, it states

a Freudian alienation of the ego from its objects of desire; second, implicitly, the poem

serves as a comment on Schwartz’ stylistic alienations, of poetic forced marches. The

poem has the effect of a crushing candor verging on sentimental overkill, and to say the

poem produces this effect is to claim that it feels curiously like a performance. Perhaps

Schwartz, who often craved a kind of metaphysical authenticity in verse, whether of the

“old noumenon” of Socrates, of a Stevensian “Summer Knowledge,” or as a Heideggerian

8Louise Bogan. “Young Modern.” Nation 148 (1939): 354.


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“shepherd of being,” was yet always performing. His own Freudianized wisdom about the

distance between the poet and the object of desire, between analytical reason and the self,

is detectable in his early verse. In “I am a Book I Neither Read Nor Wrote,” the lesson

is writ very large, almost in the manner of a Broadway show-stopper, a kind of “and I did

it somebody else’s way” song. In its evocation of the poet as stranger to himself, it recalls

references to masks in earlier Schwartz poems, referring to “masquerades,” which “crackle

like raids.” But complicating things, in speaking of “the false truths of youth” that “have

passed” him by, the poem is also an elegy to a kind of youth that Schwartz really did not

write in the first place, a kind of Wordsworthian youth, full of Prelude-ian optimism.

The poem is then both a doubly suspicious elegy and an account true to the career

thus far: he is writing of a self other than the typically suspicious “I” of his early verse,

recasting himself as a romantic figure and explaining his largest disappointment as

a failure to realize “endless love.” It is hard not to see this “endless love” as figure for a

compound of various kinds of acceptance, not just eros in action, but the symbolic

acceptance of his fathers, his poetic forbears. “I Am a Book I neither Wrote nor Read”

returns the reader in creative perplexity to the rest of Schwartz’ career and its oedipal

tensions, where the son, the ego, is maverick insight and the father, the super-ego,

tradition. (I confine the use of these analytical terms to explaining the poetry; I refrain

from any medical or psychiatric diagnosis of Schwartz. That perilous project could be

undertaken, still dubiously, with a study of his letters and his journals, but it is not my

business here.)

Early in the career, Schwartz’ Freudian inclinations are especially evident in two

varieties of claims. The first considers oedipal factors as fundamental to the design of any

yearning, and these claims appear in poetic psychodramas about literal parents and

children. The second variety of Freudian claim is a naturalistic assertion of limit: limited

power of mind, love, and knowledge of self. When these two phases of Freud meet, when

the oedipal encounters the epistemological, Schwartz may sound like Hamlet pursuing a

masters degree in psychology circa 1938: “For we are incomplete and know no future,/

And we are howling or dancing out our souls/ In beating syllables before the

curtain . . . (“Dogs Are Shakespearean, Children are Strangers”)”. As unconscious forces,

historical and biological, shade the poet like a large, looming darkness, the Freud of

contingency is yet more important to early Schwartz than a Freud of teleology. The Freud

of contingency sees understanding as conditioned by many forces, all in need of

interpretation; the teleological Freud would see these natural limits as potential destinies

to be given social analogs in family roles. The Freud of contingency is a model of

analytical attitude at play; the Freud of teleology is a doctor of natural imperatives and

assignments. Though Schwartz had an analytical nature, he gravitated on occasion to the

oedipal triangle as a fundamental structure of desire, and the resigned claims he makes

about oedipal desire may have conditioned his need for images of other destinies written

in larger abstractions.

While he never wrote anything as specifically autobiographical as Lowell’s Life Studies,

Schwartz has poems about the modern family as elementally oedipal. This is nowhere

more evident than in Coriolanus and His Mother, an ambitious collage of poetry and

prose in five parts, which reflects the structure of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. It includes

many of the play’s characters, supplanted with a motley list of guest stars including

Beethoven, Marx, and Freud. This concoction sounds wilder than it reads, even as it

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swings here toward a newspapery prose, and there toward a revenger’s hysterical

eloquence. Schwartz’ Coriolanus finally seems like a scholastic experiment when it

could have been a luminous psychodrama. Freud himself appears and makes Schwartz’

devotion to oedipal theories seem creedal:

This is the origin, this is the place,

Mother in love with son and son with her,

And his aloneness in the womb began,

Always unhappy apart from that tight cache:

O womb and egg, nervous environment,

How you have marred and marked this childhood’s man!

Unconscionable bag which none evade,

How your great warmth commits him to the shade.

Echoing Freud’s 1914 essay, “On Narcissism,” this epistemological analysis sees the drive

for metaphysical surety as a masked desire for the repetition of infantile comforts, an

attempt destined to reach only the “shade” of futility in a finite world.9 One could assume,

based on the theatrical context of the statement, that it is not fundamental to Schwartz

but performative; however, this account of desire also shows up in other poems as well, as

in “Prothalamion,” a grimly comic and affecting poem spoken by a young husband to his

new wife that includes a tale of the speaker’s mother, father, and a “whore” in his father’s

company; the mother’s rage in confronting the father “struck down the child of seven

years with shame for all three . . . and great disgust for every human being” (45). Later in

the poem, the poet confesses to his wife the limits of known love and the burdens of

unknowable desire: “I am the octopus in love with God/ For thus is my desire

inconclusible.” This view of desire seemed the destiny of his career, in a positive sense;

Schwartz seems fit to be a poet of Freudian contingencies. But he was philosophically

distracted on the way to the analysis that could have afforded expressions of more verve

and originality.

While he is capable in the Freudian, suspicious mode of being playful, wry, or tough-

minded, as in the mixture of comedy and literary naturalism in his apostrophizing his

body as “The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me,” or in writing such elegant philosophical

poems as “Out of the Watercolored Window, When You Look,” and “By Circumstances

Fed,” at other times a kind of melodramatic or existentialist weariness swamps poems, as

what is unknown and uncontrolled gains the status of a blank oppressor. Various crises in

the poems of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities are phrased as stultifying contacts with

ideas that may be called the “big intractable” elements in his poetry—large concepts that

the poet claims he can not budge, concepts which neutralize desire. A seemingly too easy

pessimism thus clogs some poems; Schwartz strives for a weighty invocation of uncon-

scious forces but ballasts several poems with ponderous references to what limits knowl-

edge or desire without exploring the conditions within the abstractions in detail: thus the

poet is oppressed by history which “has no ruth for the individual” (22); by a “darkness”

which “is infinite” (51); by “time” which is a perpetual and oppressive “farewell” (77).

A more truly psychoanalytical poetry would try to specify the symbols of desire or

the bars of its frustration in more detail, and dance with or decipher these images.

9Sigmund Freud. “On Narcissism: an Introduction,” Standard Edition, 14: 69.


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Schwartz’ later invocations of Socrates as a figure of transcendental reassurance become

odd and idolatrous, because he had implicitly challenged himself to extend the Freudian

project of expanding the realm of critical reason. To read Summer Knowledge is to witness

Schwartz map the historical advance of a skeptical enlightenment, describe its funda-

mental conditions in detail, and then revert to another, older paradigm. The Freudian

project may have seemed overwhelming, as the individual navigating history is as tough

for the poet to read as the temporal medium it inhabits; the self, too, is a “big intractable”

concept, frequently described in metaphors of theatrical distances or ignorant subser-

vience: “we are incomplete and know no future” (“Dogs are Shakespearean” 68); and

“to my own heart I am merely a serf ” (71), and, in the prototype of many similar claims,

“all men are masked” (65).

This reference to masks may seem an unfortunate theatricality, a metaphor for sus-

picion too glib and adolescent, but it resonates beyond its primary locations. The masking

has philosophical and stylistic sources that interweave, as he masks his suspicious,

skeptical self as a confident idealist, appealing to abstractions rather disconnected from

the records of experience he gives, or, absent any convincing religious structure, invoking

an apocalypse of reason in which Socrates is propped up as a would-be hero. Stylistically,

in many of his later poems, Schwartz is masked in the style of one or another forbear,

often Eliot.

Without much contact with the Freudian Schwartz, an idealist alternate usurps

much of his poetry, resulting in a tones of strained devotion. Without passing judg-

ment on idealist philosophy itself, I will say the effect of idealism on the potential

power and verve of Schwartz’s voice as a poet seems clearly negative; Schwartz seems to

surrender too easily to an intellectually incomplete kind of idealism in which ideals are

less goals or essential qualities than authorities. The apparently Freudian Schwartz may

say something as odd and compelling in “Prothalamion” as: “waking up . . . you see the

daemon breathing heavily/ His sense of ignorance, his wish to die, / For I am nothing

because my circus self/ Divides its love a million times.” But the idealist Schwartz is likely

to take the tone of a half-believed and dubiously urgent prayer. He occasionally embraces

abstraction like a foxhole convert, without explaining how the knotty Freudian problems

of desire he presents elsewhere, or perhaps in the same poem, are resolved by these ideas.

Despite an undeniable energy of aspiration, there is also a staleness, a quality of hedged

bets in this quasi-Platonic mode, moreso than in Eliot, say, because Schwartz does not

fully engage a religious rhetoric—instead he invokes something that seems oxymoronic,

a rationalist apocalypse, as when he says of Socrates, “Old Noumenon, come true, come

true” (58). This reference itself is an intrusive and unconvincing climax to a poem

that had been a meditation on the oedipal tension in all love. In the context of much

of Schwartz’ work, reason’s work is finite and its province is the ordinary—as an

antecedent of instrumental reason, Socrates would likely be the man in the Apology who

never claimed to know what he did not. But in “Socrates Ghost Must Haunt Me Now,”

Schwartz tries to turn Socrates into a kind of saving, transcendent signifier of academic

tradition, a kind of literary savior, a guarantor of traditional meaning. One imagines that

this Socrates would be outfitted not in a toga but with a tweed jacket and a pipe that

transforms itself into a luminous wand. One would think that Schwartz, based on a

poem like “The Ballet of the Fifth Year,” the next poem in his Selected Poems:

Summer Knowledge, would not beggingly claim lucidity must be wed to tradition.

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Indeed, “Ballet of the Fifth Year” has an Emersonian verve, saying that even at five, the

poet realized in skating beyond the reach of any particular authority that “Such grace, so

self-contained, was the best escape to know.” In this poem Schwartz urbanizes a romantic

commonplace, as the child is father to the man; new experience may dictate new

expressions, things yet unsaid. But if “Socrates’ Ghost” has a romantic urgency, its

intellectual climax suits a scholastic conservatism, which would hold that truth is based

on absolutes that are insensible (that is, not to be found in lived experience) and

indispensable at once (life makes no sense without these guarantors of meaning, like the

“noumenon” of Socrates himself), so the poet must pray that his authority somehow

shines forth—perhaps in a paternal acceptance for making the proper academic

references, if nowhere else. This appeal to rationalist, pseudo-religious tradition seems

a mask or effort of repression in the context of other poems that are plainly postratio-

nalist, and indeed in an essay from 1952 called “Our Country and Our Culture” Schwartz

spoke of “an acute need,” in counterpoint to “the New Criticism,” for “the intellectual as

critical nonconformist.”10

Unsurprisingly, his poetry is more successful when he releases the desire to be grand

and summational, and rather confronts the incomplete or particular. Schwartz reaffirmed

that it was better to be particular than general when he copied some words of the

philosopher Alfred Whitehead in a notebook, placing them in verse form:

there are no whole truths

there are only half truths

It is by taking the half-truth as the whole truth

that we make the truth a kind of falsehood.11

Schwartz’ poetry has more verve when he is less invested in big resolutions and more

interested in complex descriptions—that is, he seems better suited to a poetry of experi-

ence than of prophetic abstraction.

Schwartz, in lyrics like “Father and Son,” “A Young Child and His Pregnant Mother,”

and “The Ballet of the Fifth Year” points the way toward the carefully compressed,

candid, and skeptical meditations on the intersections of self and history one finds in

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop’s work in the 1950s. Selfhood in early Schwartz seems

even slipperier and more alloyed by fiction (rarely being spoken of in the first person)

than Lowell’s or Bishop’s, but Schwartz anticipates their intensities of concentration

matched with a generally anti-heroic view of the self. Though Lowell, like Schwartz, also

began his career under the shadow of Eliot (with traditionalist Allen Tate as Lowell’s

literal mentor), Lowell would venture much further than Schwartz to narrate his own

experience, opening mental floodgates to personal details, not only in 1959’s Life Studies,

but also especially in the sonnets he wrote in Notebook (1967–1968) and reworked in

subsequent volumes History (1973) and For Lizzie and Harriet (1973). Schwartz had

the talent to write a skeptical, invigorated personal verse, but protective impulses,

perhaps a surplus of shame for his since well-documented difficulties with alcohol and

10Delmore Schwartz. Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, ed. Donald A. Dike and David H. Zucker

(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970).11Delmore Schwartz. Portrait of Delmore: Journals and Notes 1939–1959, ed. Elizabeth Pollet (New York:

Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1986), 484–85.


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depression, severely restricted what of his own local mental and urban territories would

come into focus in his verse.

In his later poetry, abstractions that could be aerodynamic and intellectually

propulsive will work in ways that keep the poetry ironically earthbound and mundane,

as when he says in 1958’s “At a Solemn Musick:” “We wait, silent, in consent and in

penance/ Of patience, awaiting the serene exaltation/ Which is the liberation and

conclusion of expiation” (147). This line doubles the difficulties of expressing strong

feelings rather than clarifying them, as the theme of the poem is expressed as an

abstraction (“conclusion”) distilled from another abstraction (“expiation”). What this

experience is in sensory detail is nearly lost in various linguistic diffusing agents. The

concession that one makes to this style might be inspired by these lines from the same

poem: “Then shall the chief musician declare:/ ‘The phoenix is the meaning of the fruit,/

Until the dream is knowledge and knowledge is a dream.’ ” The nearly synesthetic intensity

of the implied analogy: that phoenix-like powers of resurrection are inscribed in the

flesh of fruit, is appealing, and the yearning the poem evokes to unite unconscious desire

and conscious understanding has some majesty. But it is too easily put, too unspecified.

The processes that he implies are semi-autonomous and univocal, the unity of dream and

knowledge, are more likely contingent and equivocal. The understanding he cultivated in

his first volume would posit that an imaginative reason must read all of the experiences

implied in the “phoenix” cluster of images. These processes are not autonomous, and

they will have details; structures describe patterns of symbols, but not their specific effects

in lives. The quasi-religious notes of surrender in “At a Solemn Musick” lack enough

specificity to convince one that the authors of the tradition to whom one would submit

are worthy to encourage the transformations of dream-desire into new harmonies with

reality.

Such diffusion of particular reference, like his risked sentimentality, was likely an

educated, meditated effort on Schwartz’ part, not just a matter of a repressive tem-

perament or a displacing imagination. Schwartz’ journals are dotted with poignant and

vivid notes that could have been cultivated into poetry, but they usually remained only in

a ledger of things too conscious, passed over as too trivial to be of use. One will not find

in Schwartz’ poetry words like these from his journal of the days April 11 and 12, 1944:

[April 11] Dozing sleep until 11:30. Dead mind again, doctor’s, opera-pointed, errands,

streetcar, fogbound day, hurried dinner, rain. AS aunt, back turned, Benzedrine, wine room,

Burdock, FOM passed, The Magic Flute, power of instruments, of silence-- [April 12] . . .

forced excitement; all day with Freud’s New Lectures--anxiety as key, duplication of pattern.

Bill and Phyllis, curving down--after contract--Dinner Bell; kitchen, sherry to rise again.

Phyllis’s pictures and reassurances. Eloquence at midnight on tablets and sherry.12

In these two days there is fascinating emphasis on substantives fairly unchained and

compellingly underexplained by verbs, and an electric succinctness: “back turned,

Benzedrine, wine room, Burdock, FOM passed, The Magic Flute, power of instruments, of

silence--.” One senses the oscillations of ennui and stimulation, anxiety and engagement,

on these gray days, with hints of relationships—“FOM” is the famous Americanist

12Delmore Schwartz. Portrait of Delmore: Journals and Notes 1939–1959, ed. Elizabeth Pollet (New York:

Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1986), 174.

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F.O. Matthiesson—utterly without specific reference in the poetry. But the proximity of

those words “Benzedrine,” “wine room,” “The Magic Flute,” “power of instruments, of

silence--” puts one in touch Schwartz’s life in New York City in 1944 more than his

weighty invocations of “big intractables.”

When he says, in the first poem of Summer Knowledge, “Ballad of the Children of the

Czar” “The child must carry his fathers on his back” he seems to be rephrasing T.S. Eliot’s

view of literary influence in a way prophetic of Schwartz’ own burdens. He acts on Eliot’s

theories of displacement ambivalently. Famously Eliot said the pains of “the man” as poet

are refracted and sublimated by the poet’s “mind that creates” and that the “emotion of art

is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself

wholly to the work to be done.”13 Schwartz’ ambivalence about Eliot is made explicit in

the negative in 1949’s “The Literary Dictatorship of T.S. Eliot,” which concludes,

By reviewing Eliot’s critical career, we can envisage a point of view which will free our

scrutiny of literature from many of the sins of the past, while at the same time illuminating

anew all that we have inherited from the past. And we can, I think, see how it might be

desirable to have no literary dictators.14

The positive side of his ambivalence about Eliotic influence is implied in this comment

in an elegant appreciation of Theodore Roethke, from 1958’s “The Cunning and Craft

of the Unconscious and Preconscious”: “it is paradoxical and true that the most natural

and frequent path to true originality, for most good poets, is through imitating the style

of a very great poet.”15 Schwartz’ own career stretches this idea to its limits, though.

The Eliotic theory of influence seems programmatically, not half-consciously, enacted

by Schwartz in frequent echoes of Eliot himself, some of them as sore-thumb famous as

“O son of man,” (“In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave”) itself a phrase from the King James

Bible, but one that Eliot made his own in The Waste Land: “O son of man/ You cannot

say or guess, for you know only/ A heap of broken images, where the sun beats . . .”.

“Naked Bed, Plato’s Cave” also echoes Eliot’s “Preludes,” as an insomniac apartment

dweller studies shadows on a wall as Eliot’s figure does, the “you” who

watched the night revealing

The thousand sordid images

Of which your soul was constituted;

They flickered against the ceiling.

Schwartz, replaces the “you” with an “I,” but the mood and context are similar:

Reflected headlights slowly slid the wall

Carpenters hammered under the shaded window,

Wind troubled the window curtains all night long,

13See T. S. Eliot. Collected Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), 331 and T. S. Eliot.

Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932).14Delmore Schwartz. Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, ed. Donald A. Dike and David H. Zucker

(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970), 331.15Delmore Schwartz. Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, ed. Donald A. Dike and David H. Zucker

(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970), 198.


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A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding . . .

The ceiling lightened again, the slanting diagram

Slid slowly forth.

An Eliotic mixture of local apartmental grimness and incantations of spiritual mutability

is fairly common in the first half of Schwartz career; one sees it here and in “Someone

Is Harshly Coughing as Before,” “Tired and Unhappy You Think of Houses,” and, even

obvious in its title echoing The Waste Land, “Sonnet: O City, City.” These poems

occasionally address a “you” as Eliot does in the manner of the prophet-voyeur in

“Preludes,” but when Schwartz does it, one has the feeling that he may be both redressing

himself for some privately conceived failure, thus provoking a deeper turn toward

imitation. That is, if the “you” is inept or dubious, the Eliotic, (and oedipal) solution is to

embrace tradition in reaction to shame. A general debt to the Eliot of The Four Quartets

manifests itself in Schwartz’s habit of rhetorical and didactic phrasing, which becomes

more pronounced as the career develops, is such formulations as this, in a poem whose

theme ironically recalls the Stevens of Credences of Summer:

For, in a way, summer knowledge is not knowledge at all: it is

Second nature, first nature fulfilled, a new birth

and a new death for rebirth, soaring and rising out

of the flames of turning October, burning November,

the towering and falling fires, growing more and vivid and tall . . .

As Schwartz moves away from descriptions of alienation within cityscapes suggestive

of night scenes painted by Edward Hopper, later poems seek to describe, or bring into

a being, a rhapsodic engagement with nature. This move also seems to explicitly mask an

inclination for urban life that Schwartz made plain in his youthful comment about the

romantics who “in turning to Nature as they did, they displayed their painful sense that

the poet no longer belonged to the society into which he was born.”16 The oedipal drama

of imitation and Eliot’s involvement in it receives a vivid and wry comment, as bold as a

dream recounted by Freud, in Schwartz’ short story “Screeno.”

“Screeno” dates from the 1940s though it was first published posthumously in 1977

and included as the finale of in the 1978 edition of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.

It may be read as a parable of the poet’s tendency to mask himself, especially in resem-

blances to T.S. Eliot. A young poet in a depressed mood goes to a movie house prepared

to see an early Spencer Tracy film and finds to his initial disappointment that a bingo-like

game called “Screeno” is part of the prefeature activities. He plays along perfunctorily but

wins the jackpot of $450. To claim the sum, he must ascend the stage and show his

numbered game card to the master of ceremonies, and in a brief interview he embarrassedly

reveals that his occupation is “poet.” When asked to quote some of his own verses, without

introduction, he recites a portion, hardly the most famous, of T.S. Eliot’s “Gerontion,” the

lines in a including “History [. . .]/ Gives too late what’s not believed in, [. . .] Gives too

soon/ [. . .] what’s thought can be dispensed with/ Till the refusal propagates a fear.”17

16Delmore Schwartz. Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, ed. Donald A. Dike and David H. Zucker

(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970), 5.17Delmore Schwartz. Screeno: Stories & Poems, ed. Cynthia Ozick (New York: New Directions, 2004), 194.

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These lines describe history as a source of traditions, rituals, texts, modes of belief,

or knowing, that one feels one should declare obsolete, but fear causes a second

reckoning, or a guilty conscience provokes a clinging to the past beyond its usefulness.

At this point in “Gerontion,” Eliot did not legitimize the fear, but the story does, in the

manner of a complex self-satire. In “Screeno,” as the poet Cornelius Schmidt is about to

collect his money, an old man in the balcony claims, based on an ambiguously printed

game card, that his numbers have won as well as Schmidt’s. On seeing the old man’s card,

Schmidt soon begins to take the elder’s side, claiming that they should both be given

the prize. Officials of the movie theater refuse; a panel of three audience members judges

the situation in the theater’s favor. Still, the old man tenaciously and self-pityingly begs

for his prize, explaining that he has been cheated his whole life. Eventually, Schmidt

decides to give the old man the money that Schmidt unambiguously won, and they leave

the theater together. In not reciting his own verse, Schmidt refuses his own vernacular,

his own production, poetically even as economically he defers to the old man on the

matter of the prize. Though the story might invite a reading as a Christian parable of

charity, in the context of Schwartz’ career the tale seems a wryer, darker parable. In any

reading, even in a strained Christian analysis, the old man is not sympathetic. The deferral

to the old man symbolically replays Schwartz’ appeals to a vague or ghostly idealism;

his refusal to recite his own verse, but rather Eliot’s becomes a comment on a critical path

in his career. Freud seems to have the last word, though he is not mentioned by name:

when Schmidt gives the old man the money, he receives “such applause” as is “heard

at public gatherings when an abstraction too vacuous is mentioned or tribute is paid

to a man long dead.”18 “Screeno” also treats subjects (a downtown, mass culture) with

a style (wry and analytical) that are scant in Schwartz’ verse beyond his first volume.

Since Richard McDougall has criticized Schwartz’ penchant for being abstract, it seems

one option that Schwartz could have taken up was a poetry of greater material parti-

cularity, a poetry of the local.19 But it is inapt to criticize Schwartz’ poetry for lacking red

wheelbarrows for ideas to depend upon. Rather than suggesting that he missed what the

glimmering material world could represent, one can note that his own early verse shows

a different mode he might have taken further. It is not material objects his poetry could

use more of, but simply more particularized accounts of experiences. The experiences

would not have had to be of materials in sunlit distinction, but even of the particulars

of dreams, relationships, and impulses. He seems aware of this tension between idealist

and Freudian, between transhistorical essentialist and time-bound existentialist attitudes

when he says “What can any actor know?/ The contradiction in every act,/ The infinite

task of the human heart” (“For One Who Would Take Man’s Life in His Hands”). This

poem, at its best in its epigrammatic climax rather than in its somewhat clumsily plotted

allegory involving Christ, Jonathan Swift, Samson, Othello, and Socrates pivots on the

Freud-inflected insight that jealous rage is alloyed with a pathetic desire for tenderness,

and that love is streaked with violent possessiveness. This poem and its sibling, “For One

Who Would Not Take His Life in His Hands” give promise of a verse crackling with the

energy of Blakean “contraries.” Among the terms implicitly opposed dialectically are, as in

these poems, love and hate, but also, self and history, language and truth, and stylistically,

18Delmore Schwartz. Screeno: Stories & Poems, ed. Cynthia Ozick (New York: New Directions, 2004), 200.19Richard McDougall. Delmore Schwartz (New York, Twayne, 1974).


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the oddly populist voice of his prose fiction and the frequently high-toned voice of the

poetry. Schwartz offers his most overt philosophical challenges in poems that describe

the self and its experience as inevitably dialectical, and these investigations transcend or

avoid collapsing into easy despair concerning big intractable concepts or, on the contrary,

into traditional rhetorics of narcotizing consolation or elation.

Without caving in toward either side of his favored philosophical antagonism between

materials and ideals, in “Out of the Watercolored Window, When You Look” Schwartz

makes a complex poetry out of a sublimely finite art that vies with a desire for absolute

truth:

When from the watercolored window idly you look

Each is but and clear to see, not steep:

So does the neat print in an actual book

Marching as if to true conclusion, reap

The illimitable blue immensely overhead,

The night of the living and the day of the dead.

I drive in an auto all night long to reach

The apple which has sewed the sunlight up:

My simple self is nothing but the speech

Pleading for the overflow of that great cup,

The darkened body, the mind still as a frieze:

All else is merely means as complex as disease! (36)

This poem and other edgily uncertain poems of his oeuvre avoid any too easily put

pessimism or consolation. The poem is composed of two six-lined stanzas; the first stanza

is an exploration of a reality-principled art, or mode of seeing. One can put almost no

stock in alchemical decipherings and still be amused that the acronymal letters embedded

in the title’s substantive; “WCW” are the initials of William Carlos Williams, who said

“no ideas but in things,” and “so much depends upon” local, material reality. Here

Schwartz entertains a materialist epistemology and loads it with Freudian tension: as

any thing is not just a thing, but a potential symbol of desire. In looking in the

reality-principled manner of the lucid, matter-of-fact watercolored window, the poet

still finds things creatively ambiguous. All things, he implies, and especially words in

print, are sublime approximations of lost objects. Thus the “watercolored window” of the

poem’s title is either a window rendered in watercolor paints or a window that is as lucid

as if it were plain water, of no special hue at all; an ambiguity suggesting that to perceive

is to be inevitably in a realm of representation, as in a Kantian sense one has no contact

with a “thing itself ” except through language—something utterly lucid is still a repre-

sentation. When one looks at reality in this mode of understanding, things are singular

and differentiated, “each is but each and clear to see, not steep.” The view out the window

is like the sight of “neat print in a book,” which reaps “the illimitable blue overhead,/ The

night of the living and the day of the dead.” So this is not a Williams reality, but a reality

in which each object is potentially sublime, grotesque, or even apocalyptic (one would

say “zombie courting,” with the poem’s marvelous “day of the dead” construction, but

Schwartz predates zombie movies by a generation), as “neat print” can contain and reflect

the “illimitable blue.”

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In the second stanza, a brief, linear narrative imagines the drive toward absolutes

as a literal automotive quest, and this libidinous “I” is contrasted to the more common-

sensical “you” of the first stanza. “I drive in an auto all night long to reach/ The apple

which has sewed the sunlight up.” This apple, which has enveloped the sun is symbol of

a different order—nearly magical—than the “print” in the first stanza that reaps “the

illimitable blue.” The “I” of the second stanza submits to this “drive” toward the symbol

that sums and contains the sun, identified alternatively with an apple of knowledge or

the cup of salvation. This invokes Ricoeur’s reading of Freud on symbols: the over-

differentiated symbol has a double meaning, one of cost, and one of plenitude.20

The self is reduced in this venture to “Pleading for the overflow of that great cup/ The

darkened body, the mind still as a frieze:/ All else is merely means as complex as disease.”

The great cup the poet wants to overflow is symbolized by the body, which becomes the

vessel of any final answer the self demands. These characters, the “you” and the “I” in the

first and second stanzas are representations of the attitudes Schwartz would likely want to

integrate or keep in dialogue, not, as is often the case in later poems, allowing the second

absolutist voice to subvert the first, the connoisseur of finitude who sees “each” as “but

each.” Thus, it can seem the first figure is awaiting the arrival of the second, by car.

Alongside the still mind, the drive takes precedence, and all else, implicitly, especially

language, becomes a means “complex as disease.” The ambiguity there is delicious: the

means is complex as disease, not simply “a disease.”

The second stanza rethinks sublimation and makes a more Freudian statement: the

apple, the symbol, has sewed sunlight, the Ding an sich, up. The circumstance in some

narrative sense—one driving all night to fulfill desire, pleading for the “overflow” of the

“dark body”—sounds plausibly sexual, but as is often the case with Schwartz, there is

no literal sex, only compression if not repression of sexual possibility. What remains is

a parable of desire that stands as a comment on Schwartz’ whole work. Desire wants an

object that is sublime; the self becomes identified with desire, and language becomes

a means “complex as disease.” The temptation described is to compress desire’s object

into a single image; this would be the infantile gambit, to repeat early, oceanic comforts.

In alternative he maps out a linguistic situation, an epistemology, and a psychology,

with energetically suspicious insights at each station. Language is a complex means to

approximate desire’s object; any object is not itself alone but a figure in the drama of

symbolic perception. Thus, we are left with a Freudian psychology, as the body wants

fulfillment based on an archetype of absolute satisfaction, a standard that must be met

with compromise and substitutions. A more enduring model of Freudian thought than

the oedipal structuralism that tilts some of Schwartz’ poems toward melodrama is

“Watercolored Window’s” emphasis on a suspicious mode of reason, or an analyst’s

intelligence. This is the positive legacy of psychoanalysis in Schwartz: a reader’s intel-

ligence, active in the poetry itself, that goes further, that reads more of the world, more of

the self, than had been dared before Freud. One of the key doublings in early Schwartz

is thus: the lyricist and analyst operate together, daring to expand the New Critical

tendency to press the personal in poetry into sublime diffusion.

20Paul Ricoeur. Freud and Philosophy; an Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1970), 496.


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“Far Rockaway” is a similarly complicated meditation on consciousness, given a

Wallace Stevens-like situation, the businessman’s vacation site. Loci of attention include

the dazzling but inert stage of the holiday (the sunlit beach, where businessmen are

“stripped of class in the bathing suit”), and the nervous conscience of a novelist, based on

Henry James, treading the boardwalk overhead. The poem becomes an implied debate

between a work-obsessed mind and a consumer’s thoughtless, time-consuming leisure:

“O glittering and rocking and bursting and blue/ --Eternities of sea and sky shadow

no pleasure.” Atlantic City is a different nature and one closer to the poet’s own experi-

ence than the salvivic nature he tries to conjure in later poems. The real object in

“Far Rockaway” is not the sea, or the imaginary Henry James, who is rendered as a

Stevensesque doctor, seeking a “cure of souls in his own anxious gaze.” It is this gaze that

is the manifestation of conscience that is the poem’s primary subject. It is, in fact, both

subject and object: “That nervous conscience amid the concessions/ Is a haunting,

haunted moon.” This figure of conscience may be a vanguard insight; it is hard to locate

its precedent in other poets’ work. It is rendered in subtle, polyform ambiguity, with no

defaulting toward an academic, Schopenhaueresque despair or, in alternative, any wish

to be rescued by Socrates or Eliot. The conscience of the artist on the boardwalk is itself

a concession (a conceding? a confection?), it rests amid the concessions, within the gaze

like a box of taffy; simultaneously it is above, like the superego, a moon that haunts; it is

also a moon haunted (by the artist’s unconscious? by an historical unconscious?); all of

these implications entwine at the close of this poem. It is of dubious merit to encourage

a very dead poet, but one wishes he had written more in this vein. A poetry of such

consciousness is hard to come by, and we could use more of it; as Schwartz’ own career

suggests, poetry tends toward philosophical absolutism, toward academic idealism,

materialism, or an allegedly pure play of language.

As a study of Schwartz tends to enforce consideration of priority—of poetic models,

inaugural statements, and certainly of archaic losses and desires, it is fitting to end with

an early poem, 1938’s “By Circumstances Fed” (42). Without descending into narcissism,

Schwartz here maintains an uncertain state of mind that becomes its own subject. The

title is ironic: one is “fed” by circumstances but not in the sense of finding epistemol-

ogical security in material things—the poem evokes the infinity of desire, and the reality

of being damned or made grand by critical consciousness itself.

By circumstances fed

Which divide attention

Among the living and the dead,

Under the blooms of the blossoming sun,

The gaze which is a tower towers

Day and night, hour by hour,

Critical of all and of one,

Dissatisfied with every flower

With all that’s been done or undone,

Converting every feature

Into its own and unknown nature;

So, once in the drugstore,

Amid all the poppy, salve and ointment,

I suddenly saw, estranged there,

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Beyond all disappointment,

My own face in the mirror. (42)

This apparently droll and mundane poem set in a drugstore retains significant meditative

power and is a map of territories that could have been, but were seldom, traveled by the

poet. By reviewing what this poem is not, we can highlight what it is: the self that looks

back at the poet is not quite the “big intractable” self that lumbers about in a cliched

funk in some other Schwartz poems, nor does this image fit the oddly creedal-sounding

affirmations of “the individual” that seem imported from transcendentalism to the end of

“Coriolanus and His Mother.” Refreshingly, the rationalist apocalypse that he courts late

in “Summer Knowledge” and early in “Socrates Ghost Must Haunt Me Now” is absent,

too. What remains is likely Freud’s best gift to Schwartz: critical consciousness as an

arbiter and guide to the ordinary, “amid the poppy, salve and ointment.” This is an

analytical means as complex as any disease it would study, this is the cure of souls: it is

an intellect that acts beyond disappointment, for it is always, like a wave, beginning anew.

This brand of realization may have seemed to trivial to pursue for a poet haunted by

Eliot’s oeuvre in the era of The Four Quartets, but it remains a figure more vital than

the hallucinatory “Nature” that resounds with echoes of Eliot (and occasionally of

Gerard Manley Hopkins) in his later verse. A desire for sublimation (that seems contrary

to his own sense of poetry as he explains it in various essays) may have pressed him to

understand a critical consciousness focussed on particulars as a liability. He also struggled

to accept a grandeur in the approximate, the variety of approximation we find in his

portrait of the perplexed poet in a drug store. If later Schwartz tends to associate fidelity

with abstraction and elation with skyward elevation, “By Circumstances Fed” stands to

validate a practical but transcendent quality that is of the intellect itself, and not of

something it cannot define, a something left as desire’s potential ultimate.


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Documents

Inconclusible Desire—The Doubling of Delmore Schwartz