Two Elegies for Delmore Schwartz

By two of his former students:

My House
By Lou Reed

The image of the poet's in the breeze
Canadian geese are flying above the trees
A mist is hanging gently on the lake
my house is very beautiful at night

My friend and teacher occupies a spare room
he's dead, at peace at last the wandering Jew
Other friends had put stones on his grave
he was the first great man that I had ever met

Sylvia and I got out our Ouija Board
to dial a spirit, across the room it soared
We were happy and amazed at what we saw
blazing stood the proud and regal name Delmore

Delmore, I missed all your funny ways
I missed your jokes and the brilliant things you said
My Dedalus to your Bloom, was such a perfect wit
and to find you in my house makes things perfect

I really got a lucky life
my writing, my motorcycle and my wife
And to top it all off a spirit of pure poetry
is living in this stone and wood house with me

The image of the poet's in the breeze
Canadian geese are flying above the trees
A mist is hanging gently on the lake
our house is very beautiful at night

Our house is very beautiful at night
our house is very beautiful at night
Our house is very beautiful at night


A Momentary Longing To Hear Sad Advice from One Long Dead
By Kenneth Koch

Who was my teacher at Harvard. Did not wear overcoat
Saying to me as we walked across the Yard
Cold brittle autumn is you should be wearing overcoat. I said
You are not wearing overcoat. He said,
You should do as I say not do as I do.
Just how American it was and how late Forties it was
Delmore, but not I, was probably aware. He quoted Finnegans Wake to me
In his New York apartment sitting on chair
Table directly in front of him. There did he write? I am wondering.
Look at this photograph said of his mother and father.
Coney Island. Do they look happy? He couldn't figure it out.
Believed Pogo to be at the limits of our culture.
Pogo. Walt Kelly must have read Joyce Delmore said.
Why don't you ask him?
Why don't you ask Walt Kelly if he read Finnegans Wake or not.
Your parents don't look happy but it is just a photograph.
Maybe they felt awkward posing for photographs.
Maybe it is just a bad photograph. Delmore is not listening
I want to hear him tell me something sad but however true.
Delmore in his tomb is sitting. People say yes everyone is dying
But here read this happy book on the subject. Not Delmore. Not that rueful man.


It's striking how similar these portraits are, and how both of them express a Yeatsian desire to communicate with Schwartz's spirit. The difference is that Reed is successful in speaking to Delmore — even has him living with him in his house! – while Koch only longs for contact.

It's also interesting to think about how Koch and Reed both cast Schwartz as the epitome of "seriousness," a role he also often claimed for himself (as in 1938's "Father and Son": "My father … taught me to be serious"). And I don't think I'm stretching it to say that the concept of "seriousness" is key for both of them: Koch making an effort to alleviate the monumental seriousness of mid-century American poetry (or rather, as he claimed many times, to give it a new definition of seriousness), and Reed, when he wasn't just trying to get or stay famous, to bring literary seriousness to rock music. In doing this both take enormous risks (Koch of being called trivial, Reed of being called pretentious) which ultimately pay off in some of the most exciting art of their respective fields and eras, at least in this blogger's opinion. What's funny is that both could have derived inspiration for these respective missions — in which they are, as it were, tunneling toward each other from opposite directions — from the same figure, although in different decades and in different cultural circumstances.

In "My House," Reed is settling into his self-consciously "mature" phase, which entails not only writing literary lyrics but also withdrawing from New York City, settling down with a woman after a few decades of bisexuality, and reclaiming the literary heritage of seriousness he had jeopardized by making records like Rock'n'Roll Animal. Schwartz is thus invoked like a guardian angel at the start of the record: "a spirit of pure poetry" to guide his passage back into the land of critical prestige, not so much Dedalus to his Bloom as Virgil to his Dante.

Koch's poem centers even more obviously around the question of seriousness, the value of the seriousness of culture, which of course was a more of a live issue in the "late Forties" (cp. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which I'll be trying to wrestle with next week) than it seems to us now. Schwartz, in the scene recalled, shows a 40s intellectual's cautious approval of popular culture ("Believed Pogo to be at the limits of our culture") which nonetheless must still be assumed to spring from a reputable highbrow source ("Walt Kelly must have read Joyce"). Schwartz's uncertainty about the cultural status of Pogo somehow fuses, heartbreakingly, with his uncertainty about his parents' past happiness; and the fact that he is putting either of these questions to a student is, in itself, somewhat sad. Koch, of course, can't answer either of these questions for him: only Walt Kelly and Schwartz's parents can, all of whom are, momentarily or permanently, absent.

But the important thing is not just that Delmore Schwartz was depressed and tortured while Koch is/was saner and happier; I want to resist reading the poem reductively, according to the "Modernism = grumpy and conflicted / Postmodernism = well-adjusted and jouissant" fallacy. The starting point, after all, is the fact that Koch now "want[s] to hear him tell me something sad but however true." Leaving aside any temptation to read biography into it (oh why bother: the poem was written in 2001; New York had been attacked by terrorists and Koch was dying of leukemia), we see that Koch is nostalgic for Schwartz's "rueful" perspective, his High Modernist values, though that nostalgia is as tentative and uncertain as Schwartz's appreciation of Walt Kelly once was. I'll stop myself from going any further than that, for now, but what I'm interested in is the way both works interweave a sympathetic portrait of Schwartz the man with Schwartz — who might also, if we want to push things still further, stand in for "the university poet" as such — the bulwark of seriousness and bearer of cultural capital.

EXTRA! EXTRA! Sandburg's class war looks toward Great War!

Check out Sandburg's draft card. Gray eyes. Sexy.

Anyway, I'm finding Sandburg more complex than I had remembered. I think I was swayed too easily by Bill Williams's scathing review of Sandburg's 1951 collected poems, where he denounces the mere accumulation of images and people in Sandburg's verse. Mere outcry, says WCW, does not cry out with the democratic directness Sandburg assumes. The truly democratic poet, for Williams, "digests that powerful incentive and puts it out as imaginative design, a new thing that embodies all their timeless agonies" (Selected Essays 276). But Williams's "poem as a field of action" has such a terribly different view of "fields" from Sandburg's midwestern vantage that his desire that Sandburg should be "disengaged" sounds faintly ludicrous (that is, if you take it as anything other than a self-analysis on Williams's part).

But listen to Sandburg the journalist, writing in the International Socialist Review (May 1917) about the question "Will Marshall Field III Enlist?". We've heard this recently: should the torpid, useless heir or heiress get it together, go to the front lines? (Whee!: "The general theory is that if he hadn't picked the world's greatest merchant's loins to spring from he would on natural form and ability be selling sox at the well-known wages paid by Marshall Field & Co. and without bonus payment at New Year's in war time with record-breaking profits.") At one point Sandburg notes, "When Marhall Field III. sings "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" with the accent on "MY," he is singing true to form, because he is chief designated heir to an estate of $350,000,000 at 50 years of age, and a big share of the country will be his." I take this to be a point about the interaction of class and prosody, and an especially interesting one as it comes up in relation to America's movement out of isolationism.

The question of the cost of poetic form comes up all the time in Chicago Poems (1916), most memorably in his most famous poem, "Chicago," with its incantatory, braggadocious rhythms of market accumulation. But poems like "Graceland" and "The Right to Grief" raise lots of questions for me: which poets were writing elegies for millionaires? Is the latter poem, which contrasts the amply commemorated rich with the neglected death of a poor girl whose father returns the day after to his job in the slaughterhouse, in any way an elegy for the hog's being butchered? Or what does it mean to compare the father sweeping pigs' blood away to the father pushing past his grief? Is grief, for Sandburg, qualitatively different across class lines, or just the degree of attention paid to it?

(ASIDE: The millionaires in Sandburg seem to me always to be cartoon millionaires, and S.'s invocation of the "cartoonist" in "Halsted Street Car" an allegory for the sort of sketching he is doing in verse; comp. to those other newspapermen like Mutt and Jeff, Krazy Kat, etc. as Gilbert Seldes analyzes them in the early 20s. END ASIDE)

Sandburg's exclamation, "I have a right to feel my throat choke about this" (in "The Right to Grief") pulls a broader social awareness of the poor, dead girl back to the individual speaker, with his very American "right" to grief. But it also recalls the singing contests that are among elegy's oldest conventions, and the origin of such contests in legitimating who had the right to bury and to mourn the dead. There is thus a kind of jockeying for possession of the poor ("stewardship" would be a more neutral word here, but i'm going with "possession"), between Sandburg's speaker and the vague top-hatted crowd.

I should say that Sandburg's reaction to the war was ambiguous, from what I understand, with his sentiment pulled between the dominant socialist opposition to the war and his own sense of America's necessary involvement. This page is better than I could be at breaking it down.

Copper and Bronze: In the brief poem "In the Back Alley," the Lincoln-head on the penny makes any circulation of the coin a sort of memorial for the great man, even if it's just newsies pitching pennies back of the tenements (and it's notably that the penny-handlers earn their keep by spreading the word, as opposed to any other job S. could have picked). But the most interesting poem I've seen yet is "Bronze," which has the statue of General Grant in Lincoln Park watching the motorized cars whizz past, as newsies yell out headlines of the "forty thousand men are dead along the Yser". The news of Battle of the Yser (16-31 Oct, 1914), which is heralded in the poem by the noise of mechanized transportation, almost rouses the statues to battle, but cannot. They sit on their pedestals, reminders of actions (Garibaldi and Shakespeare look on as well). But they are also, in their stillness and sentience, valuable stoics set apart from and maybe above the cold world (in short, the poem seems to be using these statues to test two versions of art's relation to the news of war).

What I'm wondering about a poem like this is to what extent the poetics of accumulation that Sandburg is constructing in a book like Chicago Poems (I'm not familiar enough with the full oeuvre to speak outside of this collection) are shaped by the U.S.'s neutrality? (I'll nod to Whitman here, since I haven't really considered that legacy of war verse yet, and need to.) Clair Wills has a brand new book on the neutrality of the Irish Free State during "the Emergency" (aka WWII), in which she discusses the local particularity and self-anthropologizing that was fostered by the insular gaze that became the nation's necessary policy (e.g. Patrick Kavanagh writing "The Great Hunger" at this moment).

Have either of you encountered works that speak to the contours of American responses to, or figurations of, neutrality? More broadly, what are the poetics of peace, within visible range of war?

(Lordy, I meant for this to a be a short posting...)