Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on June 11, 2008
Literary Imagination 2009 11(1):61-76; doi:10.1093/litimag/imn029
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Inconclusible Desire—The Doubling of Delmore Schwartz
*Phillip L. Beard, Auburn University, Auburn, AL 36830, USA
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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