Reading Delmore Schwartz's journals, 1939-59.
April 7, 1942: "A slight inversion of the word order, the phrasing, or the sentence structure can express, or turn to (as on an n-side polygon) another side of the subject, experience, attitude, or actuality" (42).
"And still more true, much more true and rich in diction" (42).
April 1, 1942: "The sun breaks through the cloud like revelation In long resistless parallels of strokes" (36).
"Coleridge, the friend / Whom I must most delight in" (36).
"And S.T.C. knew that God was, he knew How powerful the word, and the delights Of endless conversation, and the cool Autumnal beauties of abstraction pure" (36).
"The child is father to the man." W.B. Yeats: "Choosing whatever task's most difficult Among tasks not impossible."
April 8, 1942: "A winter fireside, candles at four o'clock, Tea and warm hearth rugs, the shutters closed, The curtains flowing, the wind and rain in drives Audible coldly outside--(with such cold sounds) (Images of the comfort of the creature) (De Quincey's idea of perfect bliss)" (43).
April 8, 1942: "But I must free myself of this wrong division, work and holiday. Constant activity and constant observation, constant passage from word to thing, from thing to word, is what is necessary" (44).
"All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram" (44).
April 9, 1945: "Cold violet April twilight--" (45).
April 11, 1945: "To express anything is to free it not only from not being known but from personal experience, personal distortion, the limited point of view of anyone at any moment" (46).
"Give me poetry and strength of character, give me strength, goodness, and knowledge, give me humility and indifference (freedom from remorse) from my own sins and from all that is said against me" (47).
April 12, 1942:
"Streamers between the clouds, lakes of light, capes of cloud, ribbons, curls, flakes, and continents of cloud" (48).
"Although there is a ceiling of purple cloud almost all over, at the western end of the sky a yellow ragged window abides" (48).
April 13, 1942:
"To be good is an activity" (50).
April 14, 1942:
"Surge on surge is riding in ...I have a point of view, I have a room With a most various and fluent view --The river now all crinkled like tinfoil-- There where the light a hundred thousand times Is fanned, or through a turning fan reflashed-- --River now hilly with wave ripples--" (50).
April 15, 1942
"And all the clouds are abstract, in a sense Nature may imitate; but it invents Upon the sky's great canvas constantly, And this, perhaps, is quite enough to see
--A great curving wing, long purple-black Composed upon the sky above the sun Going down orange, yellow, orange In a smear..." (53).
"(This kind of flow might be a new variation of blank verse.)" (53).
"Verbalizing attention plus temporal attention. I tried a more extended prehension than most, eclectic. Naming is beginning, power flows from it, repetition and combination, freedom from abstractness, yet ease with generality" (53).
"An attention which all the time reads and then sings" (53).
April 18, 1942:
""In the labyrinth of another's being-- ""(56).
"A purple-black curtain of cloud, like a quilt or alike a great Assyrian army with chariots, was over the sky" (56).
"The dusk is wondrous gray and will not fade until the night itself is full of black" (57).
April 20, 1942:
"I am a son of David now, And of attention now, and I have found Nothing better than the "attentive will" (58).
"Rhythm and metaphor become my hands, This is the kind of thing which makes a man--" (58).
"Romance extends actuality, realism examines it, there is no need to choose" (58).
"World-citizen, attention is diffused, And you, provincial character, I think Lack generality and wide horizons, Your garden is beneath the timberline, Beneath the level of the sea--" (58).
"There can be no transformation of reality where there is no imitation of reality: minute attention" (58).
5 July 1987 Sunday
11 July 1987 Saturday
Delmore Schwartz Journals & Notes 1939-59
May 5, 1942: "Form is an endless effort, and not only that, but perhaps the secret of life" (68).
"I am tortured by the endlessness of the particular" (68).
"Insight is a name for the penetration of form by subject; style might be for the transformation of subject into form" (68).
entelech--fruition
May 5, 1942: "Passes the path of the downing sunlight and is charred, amid burning silver. What entelechies dawning in me?" (70).
May 8, 1942: "Every success I knew was from the fecundative power of form. It has always been this that has brought fluency" (71).
"At every hurt, go back to guilt and humility, and then there is gratitude and freedom from pain" (71).
June 1, 1942: "Every perception rejoices in itself Like a fine catching fire through itself" (81).
June 5, 1942: "Diamond of the dew on the lilac bushes" (82). June 5, 1942:
Jowett Newman Swinburne Hopkins Tennyson
June 5, 1942: "Morning is Criticism, the Night is Infatuated Drunkenness" (82).
June 6, 1942: "(In Hopkins sound engenders, not sense, but sounds for their own sake, Swinburnian.)" (83).
July 12, 1942: "...the perception understood by means of literary forms, or grasped anew by means of them" (85).
November 29, 1942: "Many a secret is a sensuality" (96).
December 1, 1942: "To want to make 100 million dollars is a difficulty easily came by" (97).
January 1, 1943: "I am an exaltation drinker; perhaps a sleep drinker or escape drinker, too" (103).
January 2, 1943: "Wine is one of the proofs of the existence of God" "This gives me ideas, he said, caressing her rondure and moon." "Never mind the moral effect of twilight sleep; there is enough pain to go around" (104).
Sherwood Anderson: "Like most writers, I don't read much."
February 11, 1943: "The power of the symbol comes from the nature of perception of thought. The train whistle makes us see the train, the footstep in the hall reminds us of the family relative. The oranges bring back the breakfast room." "The relationship of part and whole is that of symbol and thing signified."
"To learn more and more how to make the body's knowledge rise."
May 24, 1943: "If the glow of the first hour of the morning lasted, I would give myself utterly to thought and art" (108).
"The stair shows the necessity of regular form. The game shows the necessity of conventional form" (109).
May 28, 1943: " "I feel myself much the seaside child, Gathering glittering shells in idle joy--" "
August 21, 1943: "I find life superior to anything I could invent" (125).
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories
The Ego Is Always at the Wheel : Bagatelles
Last and Lost Poems - Albert Einstein To Archibald Macleish, All Night, All Night, America, America!, Apollo Musagete, Poetry, And The Leader Of The Muses, Archaic Bust Of Apollo, At This Moment Of Time, The Choir And Music Of Solitude And Silence, Christmas Poem For Nancy, The Dances And The Dancers, Dream Of Whitman Paraphrased, Recongnized & Made More Vivid, The Famous Resort In Late Autumn, The First Night Of Fall And Falling Rain, Genesis, The Graveyard By The Sea, Sels., Greatest Thing In North America, He Who Excuses Himself Also Accuses Himself, How Can He Possess, Journey Of A Poem Compared To All The Sad Variety Of Travel, A King Of Kings, A King Among The Kings, Sels., Late Autumn In Venice, Love And Masrilyn Monroe, The Maxims Of Sisyphus, Metro-goldwyn-mayer, News Of The Gold World Of May, Now He Knows All There Is To Know, Overture, Philology Recapitulated Ontology, Poetry Is Ontology, Phoenix Lyrics, Poem For Jacques Maritain And Leon Trotzky, Poem To Johann Sebastian Bach, Poem: How Marvelous Man's Kind Is, The Poet, The Power And Glory Of Languages, Praise Is Traditional And Appropriate, Prologue: Night One, Rabbi To Preach, Salute Valentine, The Sequel, The Conclusion, The Endlessness, Sonnet On Famous And Familiar Sonnets And Experiences, Sonnet Suggested By Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare ... Et Al, Spiders, The Spring, This Is A Poem I Wrote At Night, Before The Dawn, To A Fugitive, To Helen, Two Lyrics From Kilroy's Carnival: A Masque, What Curious Dresses All Men Wear, When I Remember The Advent, Words For A Trumpet Chorale Celebrating The Autumn, Yeats Died Saturday In France
Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet - With the appearance in 1938 of his first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, twenty-four-year-old Delmore Schwartz was immediately recognized as a genuinely innovative force in American letters, drawing praise from T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams; for Tate, it was "the only genuine innovation we've had since Eliot and Pound." A decade later his book of short stories, The World Is A Wedding, was characterized by many critics as the definitive portrait of their generation. Yet Schwartz's early promise was followed by a tragic decline and finally death in a midtown Manhattan hotel at the age of fifty-two. At the height of his fame, Schwartz proclaimed himself "the poet of the Atlantic migration that made America." Schwartz was an integral member of a circle of critics, poets, and novelists that included John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Saul Bellow, who later memorialized his friend as the doomed poet Von Humbolt Fleisher in Humbolt's Gift. Drawing on interviews, an extraordinary collection of previously unpublished papers, Schwartz's brilliant satires of his friends and acquaintances, and his letters to Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and many others, James Atlas creates a vivid portrait of Schwartz and brings to life the vital literary milieu of America in the thirties and forties. "Delmore was a close friend for twenty years and I thought I knew him fairly well until I read James Atlas. This is a distinguished critical biography, brilliantly evaluating Delmore's oeuvre and sensibly relating it to his life." Dwight Macdonald. "Clear, precise, graceful ... (Atlas') biographical style makes the book read with the pleasure of a good novel." Leonard Michaels, The New York Times Book Review. "(An) intelligent and sensitive biography." The New Yorker. JAMES ATLAS is the author of Battle of the Books: The Curriculum Debate in America, and a novel, The Great Pretender. His most recent book is Bellow: A Biography.