EDITOR’S NOTE: 

Bluesky

When I taught in Syracuse University’s English department, I inherited Delmore Schwartz’s desk, strings attached. With a Delmore level of grandiosity, I compared inheriting it to Bill Clinton sitting behind John F. Kennedy’s Resolute desk. Delmore taught in the department from 1962 to 1965; my years with the desk were from 2009 to 2013. I had recently been hospitalized for a malady we shared, called bipolar disorder in my time and manic depression in his. Delmore’s illness left him raving at Bellevue, afflicted with something he called the “Heavy Bear,” and it never lightened up:

Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,That heavy bear who sleeps with me,Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp,Howls in his sleep because the tight-ropeTrembles and shows the darkness beneath.—The strutting show-off is terrified,Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,Trembles to think that his quivering meatMust finally wince to nothing at all.

The bear got heavier over the years, until he arrived at that desk at Syracuse, when it was not just accompanying him but taking over the show.

By the time the ’60s were underway, Delmore’s mania had started to outrun his productivity. The delusions had lost their filter: He thought JFK, RFK, and the pope were all conspiring against him. He was surrounded by the likes of Lou Reed and other undergrad exegetes, who would follow Delmore to the Orange Bar, where the éminence grise would drink five shots, hold court, and read aloud from Finnegans Wake. “When he read aloud from it,” Reed told me, “I thought I could understand it. When I tried to read it, I couldn’t.” (“European Son,” from the first Velvet Underground album, was dedicated to Delmore; later Reed would appoint himself “My Dedalus to your Bloom.”) When Delmore was offered tenure in 1965, he skipped town with a young woman named Victoria on his arm, his on-again, off-again paramour from before he arrived at Syracuse, someone he sometimes called his fiancée. (He told friends that making love to her was “like Grant taking Richmond.”) A year later, he ended up alone at the Columbia Hotel, a Times Square flophouse, where he would die of a heart attack at 52.

I write from Brooklyn, where Delmore Schwartz was born and still hovers. I see 25-year-old Delmore, in 1939, basking in his precocious success, as dapper a poet as there had been since Lord Byron, though his inky cloak accompanies a funereal air. He wrote his most successful work first, a short story about a tragedy unfolding in real time, a bad dream in exquisite prose. “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” was published in Partisan Review when Delmore was 24 and then included in a New Directions collection of his poems and short stories a year later. Most young men don’t fall out of bed and write a masterpiece based on a dream they just had, but Delmore did exactly that. He’d committed the obvious entrance to the club—parricide—but it was a dream; he couldn’t help it. (Philip Roth once advised a young Ian McEwan to “write as if your parents are dead.”) What would Freud say? He was still alive. Delmore would have his own thoughts a few years later:

Tell us, Freud, can it be that lovely children Have merely ugly dreams of natural functions?

These lines are from a poem called “Dogs Are Shakespearean, Children Are Stranger.” The title provokes, but its message is even darker. Delmore wanted to skip childhood and its wish fulfillments, but remember “In Dreams”: He wanted to skip the whole thing.

Every sentence of “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” was elegant and foreboding. The mother is having second thoughts; the father is exaggerating his fortune. Delusions of grandeur, and Delmore hasn’t even been conceived. There is no affection here. Regrets only.

But poems would sustain his career. Delmore’s brilliance was unchecked, and it came out as it did. The original edition of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities contained his most anthologized poems, including “The Heavy Bear Goes With Me” and “The Ballad of the Children of Czar.” All that early recognition could only go in one direction. The major fall, the minor lift. T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens sent fan letters after the publication of the book. Eliot would tell Delmore that he was the great poet of his generation, writing, “You are certainly a critic, but I want to see more poetry from you; I was much impressed by In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.”

Nearly 50 years after his death, we now have The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz, edited by Ben Mazer, and it makes the case that Delmore never stopped writing beautiful verse amid the Sturm und Drang of his life. It has been hard to place Delmore among the poets, in the shadow of Crane, Eliot, and Stevens behind him; and Berryman, who called him “the most underrated poet of the 20th century”; Lowell, who wrote two poems about him and shared his mental affliction; Auden, who privately told Delmore that his poems “could use a little more ego and a little less id”; and Bishop. Delmore never finished Genesis, his magnum opus, and even if he knew it was a doomed project—yet another instance of “nothing good will come of it”—Book 2, published for the first time here, has stunning moments. When you go as far to the other side as Delmore, you just get closer to the poesy. The poems can seem, in all their grandeur, mad and wildly presumptuous: He would grab Shakespeare or Freud by their lapels and demand an answer. But they hold up on their own without being crushed by their own ambition.

Still, it is astonishing that it has taken this long for all of Delmore’s poems to be published in one place. James Atlas’s authoritative biography, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, was in some ways too good, if that were possible: It carved out an irresistible myth of a poet and patient without inspiring enough readers to dive into the poems themselves.

Here is a poem—worth quoting in full—that was previously uncollected, the last in a chronological sequence, in perhaps Delmore’s last act of sheer brilliance on the page: “The First Night of Fall and Falling Rain.” It is autumn, a time of renewal, in a poem that sees the pathetic in the pathetic fallacy. His final volume, Summer Knowledge (1959), was put together by his friend Elizabeth Reardon. Delmore was so out of it at that point, according to Atlas, that he “never even glanced at her selections.” But the poems he was submitting in the end were his and his alone. Summer is turning to autumn. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here:

The common rain had come againSlanting and colorless, pale and anonymous,Fainting falling in the first eveningOf the first perception of the actual fall,The long and late light had slowly gathered upA sooty wood of clouded sky, dim and distant more and   moreUntil, at dusk, the very sense of selfhood waned,A weakening nothing halted, diminished or denied or set   aside,Neither tea, nor, after an hour, whiskey,Ice and then a pleasant glow, a burning,And the first leaping wood fireSince a cold night in May, too long ago to be more thanMerely a cold and vivid memory.Staring, empty, and without thoughtBeyond the rising mists of the emotion of causeless   sadness,How suddenly all consciousness leaped in spontaneous   gladness,Knowing without thinking how the falling rain (outside, all  over)In slow sustained consistent vibration all over outsideTapping window, streaking roof,    running down runnel and drainWaking a sense, once more, of all that lived outside of us,Beyond emotion, for beyond the swollen  distorted shadows and lightsOf the toy town and the vanity fair  of waking consciousness!

When Delmore wrote these lines, he was making a final visit to his muse.

To be a poet is already an affliction. You are aware of the turning of the leaves in real time. The poem is born in spite of it all. “The First Night of Fall and Falling Rain” came near the end, and yet his craft isn’t slightly diminished. It pours out, like so much falling rain, but the speaker of the poem knows the game is up: He feels the rain on the foliage. The leaves will die and disappear. When they return, Delmore’s verse is over. He is still around to inspire Lou Reed and self-destruct. The rest is silence.

Listen to him read “Starlight Like Intuition Pierced the Twelve” or “I Am Cherry Alive” or “Swift,” and hear that affect, that grandiosity, that rage, that beauty—all from a recording from the National Poetry Festival in 1962, the year he arrived at Syracuse. A few years earlier, in 1959, he was the youngest poet to receive the Bollingen Prize, but by then it was thought to be bestowed in pity. Delmore is at war with the world, and the world will win. He’s delicate one moment, petulant the next. You want to share his umbrage, until you realize that you can’t save him.

One of the last photos of him says it all. He is sitting in Washington Square, near NYU, where he received his only degree, not far from the squalid room at 813 Greenwich Avenue where “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” poured out of him. The title alluded to Yeats, but by the time this picture was taken in 1961, the title had become fate. He is wearing a coat and tie, but he may not have anywhere to go. Look at young and cocky Delmore—his mother named him for a movie star, and he looked like one—and confront the haggard man at the end. Hyperion to a satyr. He is sure that he is being bugged, stalked, wiretapped. He can’t trust anyone. That heavy bear is too much to lift.

What’s dazzling in youth can turn into something terrifying when it all ends in an elevator in a cheap hotel at 52. Delmore was trying to take out his own garbage and had a heart attack. When he was finally picked up, by the time the ambulance hit Bellevue, it was straight to the morgue. No one could save the man, but it’s not too late for his poetry.

It has been over a decade since I sat at Delmore’s desk. Someone else will be haunted by it now. I’ll never forget it: Those years in that office were rough. When I first got the desk, I had just been treated for bipolar disorder, Delmore’s ailment, and I wish I could associate the desk with more inspiration and less trauma, but that seems apropos, too. It had a faded grandeur; it could have been on Antiques Roadshow or abandoned on the street. To whoever has it now, I invoke Hart Crane’s words that now sound like a warning: “Witness now this trust,” the opening of a poem called “Possessions.” Delmore sat right there and possessed until the last autumn rain, and then for the excruciating years that followed, after the final caesura. We are mad against our will, and we get poetry as a symptom, a preexisting condition, a delusion of grandeur that took him further than he knew. It allowed him to see his own mania, his own undoing, and he had the best seat in the house:

—And then the music ceases. The bright lights floodTheatre, audience, our straining gaze, and now,Amazed as ever before, myself I seeEnter between the curtain’s folds, appearAs many titter and some clap hands in glee,A sad young clown in gowns of domino,X-ray, cartoon, Picasso’s freak in blue,

From the box-seat I see myself on show.