Delorme schwartz biography definition
Home / Related Biographies / Delorme schwartz biography definition
John Berryman, Saul Bellow, and Robert Lowell are among the writers that profess Schwartz's influence on their own work. Schwartz also received several fellowships and grants throughout his life, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Prize, a Fulbright fellowship (he canceled it amidst his second divorce), a grant by the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and a residency at the writer's colony Yaddo.
It received immediate and intense praise by many, including Ezra Pound, T.S Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, and Vladimir Nabokov. After a stay in Bellevue, he was transferred to Payne-Whitney Clinic. Students admired him and he maintained a strong influence on his students. Pollet left Schwartz in the fall of 1955, after enduring years of his erratic and abusive behavior, and stayed with a friend in a location she kept secret from Schwartz.
Their tumultuous marriage would be the source of anger and disappointment for Schwartz in his writings and future relationships. Thus, natively, and
Naturally when on an April Sunday in an ice cream parlor Jeremiah
Was requested to choose between a chocolate sundae and a banana split
He answered unhesitatingly, having no need to think of it
Being a true-blue American, determined to continue as he began:
Rejected the either-or of Kierkegaard, and many another European;
Refusing to accept alternatives, refusing to believe the choice of between;
Rejecting selection; denying dilemma; electing absolute affirmation: knowing
in his breast
The infinite and the gold
Of the endless frontier, the deathless West.
“Both: I will have them both!” declared this true-blue American
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, on an April Sunday, instructed
By the great department stores, by the Five-and-Ten,
Taught by Christmas, by the circus, by the vulgarity and grandeur of
Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon,
Tutored by the grandeur, vulgarity, and infinite appetite gratified and
Shining in the darkness, of the moonlight
On Saturdays at the double bills of the pictures,
The consummation of the advertisements of the imagination of the light
Which is as it was—the infinite belief in infinite hope—of Columbus,
Barnum, Edison, and Jeremiah Dickson.
Schwartz, Delmore, 1913-1966
Skip to main content
Dates
Biography
Delmore Schwartz was born in Brooklyn, New York on December 8, 1913 to Romanian-born immigrants Harry and Rose Schwartz.
Bellow's 1973 novel Humboldt's Gift, which won the Pulitzer Prize, is a semi-fictional memoir about Schwartz.
Other published works by Schwartz include Shenandoah (1941), Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems (1950), Summer Knowledge: Selected Poems (1938-1958) (1959), and Successful Love and Other Stories (1961).
Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) Identifier
Suggest a Correction
Found in 7 Collections and/or Records:
Letter, postcard, and poems, 1938-1959, undated
Part of Collection — Box 2: [Barcode: 39002137170040], Folder: GROUP 23, F-1
Call Number: JWJ MSS MISC
Scope and Contents: TLS to Dwight Macdonald, 1958 Dec 30, discussing his hopes of money for work sent to Ginsburg and Hess and enclosing a poem, "Sterne," for Gloria Macdonald; APcS to Dwight Macdonald, 1938 Jun 29, from Bennington, Vermont, inviting him to stay; two-line poem on the back of an envelope for the Macdonalds, 1958 Aug; envelope addressed to Miss Hettie Cohen, 1959 Mar 4; manuscript notes on "Having Snow"; manuscript poem, "March 29, I"; and typescript poem, "Poem," beginning "The winter sky,...
Other writers respected Schwartz's talent and work but found it difficult to weather his accusations of artistic jealousy, plagiarism, and gossip. Major correspondents include Richard Aldington, George Antheil, William Bird, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, James Laughlin, Wyndham Lewis, Marianne Moore, Odon Por, and Henry Swabey. Major subjects represented in the papers include: communism and the Trotskyite movement, journalism and publishing, American social and political life (1920s-1970s), pacifism, and the...
Schwartz developed an erratic relationship with his Jewish heritage that remained throughout his life, vacillating between engaged optimism and resentment of his parents' generation's traditional ways.
Dates: 1865-1984, bulk 1920-1978
Found in: Manuscripts and Archives > Dwight Macdonald papers
Ezra Pound Papers
Collection
Call Number: YCAL MSS 43
The Ezra Pound Papers document the literary career and political interests of Ezra Pound.
Writings and notebooks comprise the bulk of the papers. He died there, of a heart attack, on July 11, 1966.
Schwartz, Delmore (1913-1966)
Delmore Schwartz, born in Brooklyn, was the son of Jewish immigrants from Romania. After graduation from George Washington High School, Schwartz enrolled in a college prep course at Columbia University and in 1931 he transferred to the University of Wisconsin.
When he was nine, his real estate operator father left his wife and children and moved to Chicago.
After studying with Sidney Hook, admirer of Karl Marx and John Dewey, he earned a New York University B.A. in philosophy and then did graduate work in philosophy at Harvard from 1935 to 1937, especially appreciating Professor Alfred North Whitehead. Harry Schwartz was a successful real estate businessman and Delmore Schwartz grew up comfortably middle class.
Notebooks span two decades and document Schwartz's increasingly troubled mind and... Lowell considered him to be the most underrated poet of the century. He graduated with a B.A. in philosophy in 1935. In 2024, Farrar, Straus and Giroux released The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz, edited by Ben Mazer.