Though Delmore Schwartz was once considered the greatest young poet in America, now his name is rarely mentioned without the term “failed promise” somewhere nearby.

In WOUNDED SURGEON, a book about Schwartz and five other Confessional poets, Adam Kirsch says that it was Schwartz who first “enacted the transition from Modernist to post-Modernist” poetry, but he calls Schwartz “the only important poet of his generation whose work declined, rather than improved, with the years.”

Robert Lowell’s poem “To Delmore Schwartz” and John Berryman’s set of Dream Songs mourning Schwartz’s death are full of romantic reminiscences–and of the dream of being a poet. Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift is based on Schwartz’s early rise and precipitous fall.

For the literary generation to which these writers belonged Delmore Schwartz became almost a caricature, cautioning against the hubris that can come with early promise. He died a virtual unknown in a seedy Times Square Hotel.

DREAM SONG 150:

He had followers but they could not find him;

friends but they could not find him. He hid his gift

in the center of Manhattan,

without a girl, in cheap hotels,

so disturbed on the street friends avoided him

Where did he come by his lift

which all we must or we would rapidly die:

did he remember the more beautiful & fresh poems

of early manhood now?

or did his subtle & strict standards allow

them nothing, baffled? What then did self-love show

of the weaker later, somehow?

I’d bleed to say his lovely work improved

but it is not so. He painfully removed

himself from the ordinary contracts

and shook with resentment. What final thought

solaced his fall to the hotel carpet, if any,

& the New York Times’s facts?

Write a poem about Delmore Schwartz, or about what he represented to his peers either at the height of his success or at the time of his death. Learn about his life and incorporate what you’ve learned into the poem–or imagine details of his life, and substitute those invented details for the real.

OR erect, in a poem, a contemporary Delmore Schwartz: What would his poems sound like? who would he write like? look like? act like? Where would he live? Who would read him? Who would he drink with? Where would he go to school?