Word: schwartz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...young poet since has so dazzled his peers. When Schwartz's first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, appeared in 1938, Critic Allen Tate called it "the first real innovation that we've had since Eliot and Pound." T.S. Eliot himself was "much impressed...
...Schwartz's achievement limited to verse. The title work was a brilliant short story whose narrator witnessed the past courtship of his mother and father, interrupting with cries of "Don't do it! It's not too late ..." No less a judge than Vladimir Nabokov placed this tale -written when Schwartz was only 21 -among his "half a dozen favorites in modern literature...
That descent never came. What happened to the promise, the flamboyant charm? With care and intelligence, James Atlas chronicles a decline as moving as it is horrifying. By the time Schwartz reached 30 his center could no longer hold. He had started to drink heavily. His marriage broke up. One day in 1947, suddenly and finally, he left Harvard, convinced of his double exile from the American Dream: as a poet...
...spiral curved down, Schwartz ran through more and more women, more and more colleges. He campus-hopped to Princeton, Kenyon, the universities of Chicago, California, Syracuse. His ambition to be the Great American Poet deteriorated into a panicky need for money. Inspiration was replaced by alcohol and amphetamines. The body went to flab, the handsome face to coarseness. Fellow Poet Hayden Carruth remembered Schwartz slouching toward 40: "He looked and spoke like a defeated shipping-house clerk...
...trailing from one rented room to the next, he made desperate resolutions: "To get up at eight o'clock-and to take vitamins, join a gym, buy new clothes, answer mail." Occasionally there was rebirth, as with his poem about the disciples, "Starlight like Intuition Pierced the Twelve"-Schwartz always could write titles. But below the labels the quality was diminishing...