Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz

EDITOR’S PREFACE

For readers of at least the last two decades, it has been extremely difficult to construct an accurate picture of the shape of Delmore Schwartz’s career. Between Schwartz’s death in 1966 and the early 1980s, a number of posthumous books were published. These included volumes that are now already out of print: James Atlas’s excellent biography, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet; Portrait of Delmore, containing excerpts from Schwartz’s journals, edited by his second wife Elizabeth Pollet; The Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, edited by Donald Dike and David Zucker; two collections of letters; and Shenandoah and Other Verse Plays, edited by Robert Phillips. Schwartz’s own original collections of poetry and prose — his 1938 debut In Dreams Begin Responsibilities; Genesis: Book One, the only published volume of his uncompleted epic; The World Is a Wedding, his first book of stories; Vaudeville for a Princess, his second book of poetry and prose; and Successful Love, his last story collection — have all been unavailable for decades. Some prose and poetry from these books is contained in various editions published by New Directions. But none of these selections give a truly accurate sense of the development of Schwartz’s art and the unfolding of his literary career.

It is my goal to offer in this single volume the best and most representative of Schwartz’s writing, much of it available for the first time in years, some of it published for the first time. I hope readers will be able to gain a broad, if not complete, understanding of Delmore Schwartz the literary artist. Selections from Genesis are reprinted here for the first time since the book’s original publication in the 1940s; as a whole, the poem is unsuccessful, but, as John Ashbery says in his introduction, there are many stunning passages. I have tried to select a few that represent the whole work. I have also added two unpublished poems found in Schwartz’s archives, held at Yale. The book includes, for the first time, selections from Schwartz’s unpublished book on T. S. Eliot, commissioned by James Laughlin for his Masters of Modern Literature series. This series, containing critical books about single authors, was published early in New Directions’ history.

As it is my goal to portray the unfolding of Schwartz’s career, I have grouped the pieces according to the order of their original publication in Delmore’s own books, though where pieces were reprinted in later books, I have used the later book as my textual source. In Summer Knowledge, Schwartz seemed to have found a more appealing order for the poems in his first book, so I have used that ordering. I am not a textual scholar; I have done my best with the material from the archives to interpret Schwartz’s handwritten drafts and corrections. I only hope any mistakes I have made will be corrected by a future researcher.

I owe thanks to many people, foremost among them my wife Brenda Shaughnessy, who has had to suffer Schwartz’s long residence in our household. I am also grateful to Robert Phillips, Schwartz’s literary executor, for his support of this project. Barbara Epler, Jeffrey Yang, Declan Spring, and Laurie Callahan of New Directions carried forward James Laughlin’s devotion to Delmore, an early author and advisor to the press, and I am eternally thankful to them for giving life to this project. Thank you to John Ashbery for the use of his lecture as the foreword to this book. I am also grateful to my research assistant Monica Sok, and to Don Share and Stephen Burt for much help and advice.

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER