Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz
With his New Directions debut in 1938, the twenty-five-year-old Delmore Schwartz was hailed as a genius and among the most promising writers of his generation. Yet he died in relative obscurity in 1966, wracked by mental illness and substance abuse. Sadly, his literary legacy has been overshadowed by the story of his tragic life.
Among poets, Schwartz was a prototype for the confessional movement made famous by his slightly younger friends Robert Lowell and John Berryman. While his stories and novellas about Jewish American experience laid the groundwork for novels by Saul Bellow (whose Humboldt's Gift is based on Schwartz's life) and Philip Roth.
Much of Schwartz's writing has been out of print for decades. This volume aims to restore Schwartz to his proper place in the canon of American literature and give new readers access to the breadth of his achievement. Included are selections from the in-print stories and poems, as well as excerpts from his long unavailable epic poem Genesis, a never-completed book-length work on T. S. Eliot, and unpublished poems from his archives.
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Become an affiliateCraig Morgan Teicher is the author of four books of poems: Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey (BOA, 2021); The Trembling Answers (BOA, 2017), which won the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; To Keep Love Blurry (BOA, 2012); and Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems (CLP, 2007), winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry. He also wrote Cradle Book: Stories and Fables (BOA, 2010) and the chapbook Ambivalence and Other Conundrums (Omnidawn, 2014). His first collection of essays, We Begin in Gladness, was published by Graywolf in November, 2018.
Teicher edited Once and For All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz (New Directions, 2016) and serves as a poetry editor for The Literary Review. He writes about books for many publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The LA Times, and NPR. He worked for many years at Publishers Weekly and is now Digital Director of The Paris Review. He is a 2021 recipient of a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and children.
John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He wrote more than twenty books of poetry, including Quick Question; Planisphere; Notes from the Air; A Worldly Country; Where Shall I Wander; and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. The winner of many prizes and awards, both nationally and internationally, he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2011 and a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House, in 2012. Ashbery died in September 2017 at the age of ninety.
This new collection of Delmore Schwartz's work reads like a literary "CV of Failures," a powerful testament to a life shaken by the Great Depression. As we navigate the long road to national recovery, we can use his writing both as a mirror and as a compass.--Jason Boog
Delmore's genius survives in the sound of his words, in his hypnotizing lines.--Jonathan Galassi
This richly illuminating collection should help secure Schwartz the renewed appreciation he deserves.--Donna Seaman
This is a consistently intriguing volume that devotees and neophytes will want on their shelf.
For Schwartz poetry was ongoing and unstoppable, a process as compulsive and endless as the mariner's telling of his tale.--Mark Ford
What complicates and enriches Schwartz's comedy is, I think, a reaching out toward nobility, a shy aspiring spirituality, a moment or two of achieved purity of feeling.--Irving Howe
Excellent writing.
One of the young princes of American literature in the middle of the 20th century
[V]ivid details of lived experience are thrust throughout Schwartz's writing. Readers are left reeling among elemental features of the world, physical and immediate yet drenched as well with historical and literary ambience.--Patrick James Dunagan
A genius... one of the greatest writers of our era.--Lou Reed
Once and for All serves as an ideal introduction for the curious reader.--Adam Kirsch