Literary Imagination Advance Access published online on June 11, 2008
Literary Imagination, 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
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
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