| Sumario: | More than perhaps any other poet in New York in the 1930s and '40s, Delmore Schwartz defined the direction of American letters. "Cosmopolitan, radical, at home with Rilke, Trotsky, Pound, he was the very embodiment of the New York intelligentsia," James Atlas wrote in his classic 1977 biography of Schwartz. A provocative, Byronic figure who edited Partisan Review in its prime, Schwartz was at all the parties: the one where Norman Mailer stabbed his wife; another where Schwartz himself accosted Hannah Arendt; gin-soaked parties with W.H. Auden, Djuna Barnes, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and Dylan Thomas. Schwartz is crouching, with a cigarette and a mischievous smirk, in the foreground of a famous 1948 photo in which Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, and other members of the American literary pantheon blend into the crowd. Irving Howe, the cofounder of Dissent , remembered that on the eve of the Second World War, Schwartz was "the poet of the historical moment."
|
|---|