Delmore Schwartz and Life in the Middle

It's a bit surprising that Delmore Schwartz doesn't appear in either the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry or the Gioia/Mason/Schoerke anthology "Twentieth-Century American Poetry." I understand that his work was uneven and that he often reached for philosophical meaning that he failed to obtain, but there are some real successes, too. I enjoy "A Dream of Winter, Empty, Woolen, Ice-White and Brittle," a meditation on potentiality that sees the present as a fitful motion toward ripeness.

His work often investigates what it is to be in the middle of something, that is, to be between one choice and another, or one perspective and another. I believe he fails to achieve his aims in much of his work because he forgets that the key concept of this investigation is "being." He interrogates the concept of middle-ness, but leaves being behind. He pursues an abstraction rather than an instantiation. This, from "The First Morning of the Second World," is Schwartz at his worst:

Suddenly and certainly I saw how surely the measure and treasure of pleasure is being as being with, belonging
Figured and touched in the experience of voices in chorus.
Withness is ripeness,
Ripeness is withness,
To be is to be in love,
Love is the fullness of being.

This flow of abstractions misses any sense of living in love. Some of this could be accepted if we had been given an intersection of lives -- even the sight of someone else's toothbrush in your bathroom might help convince me that withness is ripeness.

But what I like about Schwartz is valuable, too. He has fun with language. He displays a tumbling, word-over-word ebullience that recalls Gerard Manley Hopkins. For example, here's a dashing burst of metrical bounce, alliteration, and assonance from "The Deceptive Present, The Phoenix Year":

Who could believe then
In the green, glittering vividness of full-leafed summer?
Who will be able to believe, when winter again begins
After the autumn burns down again, and the day is ashen,
And all returns to winter and winter's ashes,
Wet, white, ice, wooden, dulled and dead, brittle and frozen

And there are occasions when he remembers how compelling details can be. My favorite poem of his is "During December's Death," in which the world of tragedy and dread, "in which the only light / Was the dread and white of the terrified animals' eyes," is balanced by a particularity like: "I thought I heard the fresh scraping of the flying steel of boys on roller skates / Rollicking over the asphalt in 1926." To be caught in the dialectic of hope and despair is so much more moving when one does it rather than considers it.