Search Results

“... but the coroner decided it was an accident. While the premature deaths of, say, John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath seemed somehow implicit in the trajectory of their careers, there was nothing remotely maudit about Jarrell, until the last couple of years of his life, when the approach of his 50th birthday induced a bout of what he ...”

“... Terence Malick, lots of Yeats, lots and lots of Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’, Scott Fitzgerald, Delmore Schwartz, Marilyn Monroe, Un Chien Andalou, Hart Crane, Ben Hur... An index to proper names in the book would be several pages long. This all-pervasive cosmopolitan glamorousness, often treated ironically, is most vivid in ‘7, Middagh ...”

“... best catches the manner of their encounters and rivalries, in her memoir, Poets in Their Youth.) Delmore Schwartz, Roethke, Jarrell and Berryman were all self-consciously poètes maudits, and they all died before Lowell. So did his pupils Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Dying at 60, Lowell, for all his self-destructive ways, was a survivor. Speaking of ...”

“... work, though, he remains the most fascinating figure of his literary generation. Lowell, Berryman, Delmore Schwartz and some lesser figures were fairly dotty, and the dottiness both coloured and damaged their work. Jarrell’s emotional complications were as great as theirs (Pictures can be seen as a desperate attempt to show that prose can be as ...”

“... I take ‘useless’ to be a term of pleasure. Responsibilities may begin in dreams, as Yeats and Delmore Schwartz mused: but such a beginning can be eluded, Ashbery takes pleasure in assuming. There is time yet. ‘Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.’ If Ashbery’s poems are monologues or ‘dialogues of one’, much depends upon ...”

“... went. Literature was a vocation in those days, not a profession. For Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz and Randall Jarrell, disciples of those exemplary teacher-critics John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, criticism was an essential component of a literary career. And for the critics, the obverse was true: Lionel Trilling wrote fiction, Harold ...”

“... Dwight Macdonald, and charmed countless literary lights as the perfect ‘Good European’ (though Delmore Schwartz once dismissed her as ‘that Weimar Republic flapper’). In the last decade of her life, her commentaries on contemporary political issues, uncommonly learned by American standards, appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Review of ...”

“... who ‘comes as the subduer of Antichrist’. But here too there is a problem. In the words of Delmore Schwartz, ‘Tiger Christ unsheathed his sword, / Threw it down, became a lamb.’ So who is best equipped to be the saviour, Christ or Dionysus? Only Nietzscheans need answer. For earlier centuries, one prefigured the other. In Poussin’s drawing ...”

“... and fallen under the influence of the man he called his ‘spiritual godfather’, the poet Delmore Schwartz, then approaching the final phase of his depressive mania, and convinced nearly everyone was secretly spying on him for Nelson Rockefeller. ‘Even paranoiacs have real enemies’ was Schwartz’s ...”

“... his marriage to Stafford, Lowell started an affair with Gertrude Buckman, recently divorced from Delmore Schwartz. In 1947, Stafford arranged for Lowell, Buckman and herself to go to the Bronx zoo. The visit wasn’t a success. In 1948, Lowell started seeing Carley Dawson and hoped she would ‘become close friends’ with Buckman, whom he had just ...”

“... The work of James Agee, Hannah Arendt, Fred Dupee, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Philip Rahv, Delmore Schwartz, Edmund Wilson – these are some of the names Mrs Trilling mentions – gave the myth one of the best runs it has had anywhere. The language of the myth looks a little odd now – people have repeatedly attacked both Trillings’ use of the ...”

“... he was born with a talent for seeing the fictional potential in a blade of grass, so give him a Delmore Schwartz, give him a John Berryman or a deep-souled, big-eyed woman like wife number two, Sondra Tschacbasov, and watch the trouble begin and the pages pile up. Yet at what cost? People felt used, they felt robbed, outclassed, out-worded, and Bellow ...”

“... wings and of none, the Europeanised cultural and literary Modernists such as Clement Greenberg, Delmore Schwartz, Harold Rosenberg and, to a different degree, Malcolm Cowley – those who found Partisan Review an alternative to callow nativism, a transatlantic lifeline to Eliot, Malraux, Silone. To give the roll-call of magazines, as Jumonville ...”

“... Among others who leapt to the defence of culture as they knew it were Donald Hall, Herbert Gold, Delmore Schwartz, Truman Capote (on Kerouac: ‘that’s not writing, that’s type-writing’), Robert Brustein and James Dickey (‘Howl is the skin of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the conventional maunderings of one type of American ...”

“... He had published three gloomily introspective novels for adults, one of which had been praised by Delmore Schwartz, and he was an elegant, speedy translator, most recently of Simone de Beauvoir. Further information was in short supply, and he was unhelpful when publicists tried to elicit more of it, but he seemed to have some sort of Anglo-Irish ...”