The New Yorker:

Delmore Schwartz tried to change poetry, often by putting his own painful life on the page. The cost was that failure felt all the more acute.

By Maggie Doherty

Delmore Schwartz died in the early morning of July 11, 1966, in an ambulance on the way to Roosevelt Hospital. He’d been living alone in a seedy hotel near Times Square, reading compulsively and scribbling in the many notebooks that he kept during his last, itinerant years. At fifty-two, he was no longer the precocious young writer and critic—“blazing with insight, warm with gossip,” as his friend John Berryman described him—who had charmed poetry’s old masters and young upstarts alike. He was often drunk, paranoid, and deeply unwell; friends failed to recognize him in the street. Schwartz spent the hours before his death banging about his hotel room, then decided to take out the trash. He suffered a heart attack in the elevator, stumbled onto the hotel’s fourth floor, and lay on the ground for more than an hour, annoying other residents with his inarticulate cries. After he died, his body went unclaimed for days. In “Humboldt’s Gift” (1975), a novel memorializing Schwartz, Saul Bellow reflected on his friend’s sad end: “At the morgue there were no readers of modern poetry.”

Schwartz and his peers—a group of gifted, haunted poets that included Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and Theodore Roethke—often complained that they lived “in a period inhospitable to poetry.” Starting out after the innovations of modernism, these men found it hard to write in the shadow of Pound and Eliot, and hard, too, to write from within a burgeoning American empire, whose values were not their own. A second Lost Generation, they womanized, self-medicated with alcohol and amphetamines, and languished in university English departments, where they taught to pay the bills. Casting about for a distinct poetic identity, they imagined they’d someday find success. Berryman, in one of his Dream Songs, describes them waiting “for fame to descend / with a scarlet mantle & tell us who we were.”

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