Delmore Schwartz

Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966) made one of the most sensational debuts in the history of American poetry when he published his first collection of poetry (and a story, and a verse play), In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, with New Directions four days after his 25th birthday in 1938. He received his B.A. in Philosophy from N.Y.U. before studying Philosophy as a graduate student at Harvard. He left Harvard without taking a degree, to pursue writing and publishing. Despite continued literary successes, increasing problems with drinking, pill taking, insomnia, and mental illness ravaged Schwartz's life. His self-proclaimed masterpiece Genesis: Book One was a commercial and critical failure. Schwartz taught composition at Harvard from 1940-1947, and was poetry editor of the Partisan Review from 1943-1954. In 1959 he won the Bollingen prize in Poetry for Summer Knowledge: New and Selected Poems 1938-1958, the youngest recipient to receive the prize. Much of his poetry has been out of print for over half a century, but is now being collected by editor Ben Mazer in The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.