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“... The​ world was rigged against Delmore Schwartz. His mother, Rose, was to blame. After all, it was she who decided on his first name – the ‘crucial crime’, and an expression, he felt, of her ‘brazen gaucheness’, her botched attempt to assimilate into American society. ‘I never heard anybody call him “Schwartz”,’ Dwight Macdonald recalled ...”

“... Like Tristram Shandy, Delmore Schwartz so hated his name that he sometimes used to attribute all of his misfortunes to it. It was an obsession he enjoyed feeding: he would invent ridiculous sources for it – a delicatessen, a Pullman railroad car, a Tammany Hall club – while in his stories and poems he would always inflict on his leading character, who was always himself, a name exotic or absurd, half old-time Jewish and half Hollywood – Shenandoah Fish, Hershey Green, Cornelius Schmidt ...”

“... down Madison Avenue In the summer crowd, stark naked and proud of herself? Where’s the poet Delmore Schwartz I once saw sitting In Washington Square Park gesturing theatrically to himself? Where’s the young man in a wheelchair pushed by his mother Who kept shouting about wanting to kill more Vietnamese? Mr Undertaker, sitting in a window of a ...”

“... over the complete, ten-year span of its writing. The author, James Atlas, whose biography of Delmore Schwartz appeared in 1977 and who is the general editor of the Penguin Lives Series, was given full access to Bellow’s letters and unpublished manuscripts and final permission to quote all the passages he wanted to use. He was free to interview ...”

“... sometimes known as ‘confessional’ poets or ‘mid-century’ poets: Lowell, Berryman, Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop and Theodore Roethke. The last two were more peripheral, both less overtly confessional, especially Bishop, and not so much on the scene, New York or Ivy League (though Bishop turned up ...”

“... of academe over the years, were Jacques Barzun, R.P. Blackmur, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Delmore Schwartz, Allen Tate, Kenneth Burke, Robert Fitzgerald, Leslie Fiedler and John Crowe Ransom – this last its founder as a school of literary criticism ‘to teach those who teach it’. Marianne Moore, in Brooklyn, had a quieter time, but was just ...”

“... Pretender is a first novel. But Atlas has some prior fame as the author of a powerful biography of Delmore Schwartz, America’s poète maudit who died tragically unfulfilled in 1966, having lived out the truth of one of his best essays: ‘The Isolation of the Modern Poet’. The Great Pretender tells the story of a tyro versifier, who comes to artistic ...”

“... account both of her marriage and of the extraordinary circle of friends, including Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell and Saul Bellow, that Berryman gathered at this period. Berryman’s life can be summarised, albeit crudely, as follows: he was born in 1914, the son of John Allyn Smith, who died in 1926, apparently by suicide; his mother ...”

“... Atlas’s highly anticipated successor to his wunderkind biography of the brilliant, bedevilled Delmore Schwartz, whose combustible presence served as the inspiration for Von Humboldt Fleisher in Bellow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Humboldt’s Gift. With Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, Atlas ...”

“... New York Times magazine, and took us over the usual jumps. Gone are the days of Partisan Review, Delmore Schwartz, Dwight Mac Donald etc etc. No longer the tempest of debate over Trotsky, The Waste Land, Orwell, blah, blah. Today the assimilation of the Jewish American, the rise of rents in midtown Manhattan, the erosion of Village life, yawn, yawn. The ...”

“... from a man, or men, and Laskin is consistently disobliging about both her and her resulting work. Delmore Schwartz once opined that All poets’ wives have rotten lives, Their husbands look at them like knives ... Exactitude their livelihood And rhyme their only gratitude. He would have been stirred to his depths, perhaps, by Sylvia Plath’s implied ...”

“... Berryman began to spend most of his off-campus time in the company of mad or near-mad poets like Delmore Schwartz and Robert Lowell. Even the professors he saw most of – Van Doren, Richard Blackmur – published poems and were reckoned to be mildly cranky. Van Doren, for instance, would later advise Berryman that ‘scholarship’ was fit only ‘for ...”

“... of his plotting and the cautious plodding of his prose. In ‘Peep Show’ he does a soft-core Delmore Schwartz act, aping the Freudian terror of the stories ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’ and ‘The Track Meet’. Allen Fein, a married man with a shiksa wife, enters a Times Square peep show and buys several tokens; after seeing one beautiful ...”

“... in life she was married to Robert Lowell and was friends with Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom and Delmore Schwartz, and that later she married A.J. Liebling and was friends with Louis Auchincloss, Wilfrid Sheed and Howard Moss, does not suffice. Roberts hopes to add spice to his book by playing detective with Stafford’s medical record – this also ...”

“... Order of Merit, the Nobel Prize. Eliot was celebrated, studied, written about, endlessly cited (Delmore Schwartz wrote in 1949 of ‘the literary dictatorship of T.S. Eliot’), while Pound, released in 1958 after 13 years’ confinement, soon lapsed into the silences which are his final Cantos. Two separate facts kept his reputation ...”