Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge

✍ Scribed by Delmore Schwartz

• Publisher: New Directions
• Year: 1967
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 240
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Back cover: "In July of 1966 the New York literary community was shocked to learn that a heart-attack victim found in a Broadway hotel had been identified as the poet Delmore Schwartz. It was a tragic story. From the appearance of his first book of poems and stores, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, in 1938, Schwartz had been the golden boy, a young culture-hero, of the liberal intellectuals. A series of remarkable books - the autobiographical Genesis, the play Shenandoah, the stories of The World Is A Wedding, and others - confirmed his reputation. Then a cruel mental illness took hold which wrecked his academic career and alienated him from the friends who tried in vain to help.
A poet must be judged by his work, not the circumstances of his life. As this selection from his earlier books which he made himself and published in 1959 as Summer Knowledge clearly demonstrates, Delmore Schwartz's secure position among the foremost poets of his generation. But, in a dramatic way - and it was always one of the touchstones of his art that he could dramatize ideas in poetry as few others could - the tragedy of his later life and lonely death are inseparable from his work. Like some tormented figure in a myth, Delmore Schwartz acted out in his life, as he wrote of it in poems and stories, the alienation of the poet from our society."

"Author's Note:
Most of the poems in the first half of the book have been revised since they were first published in 1938. I have also included several poems written at that time but never published before. The second half of the book consists of a selection of poems written during the past five years and, in addition, several poems selected from Vaudeville for a Princess and one poem from Genesis: Book One, a long narrative poem which appeared in 1943. Thus, in a very real sense, all of the poems in this volume are selected poems; and, since for me, as for many poets, the temptation to revise one's work is often irresistible, there is also a sense in which all of the poems in this selection are new: I have not always included various revisions, but I have examined and chosen among them from the point of view which is signified by the title of the volume: Summer Knowledge."

✦ Table of Contents

I. The Dream Of Knowledge
1. The Dreams Which Begin in Responsibilities
- The Ballad of the Children of the Czar
- In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave
- At This Moment of Time
- The Beautiful American Word, Sure
- O Love, Sweet Animal
- Father and Son
- Far Rockaway
- The Sin of Hamlet
- Out of the Watercolored Window, When You Look
- Someone Is Harshly Coughing as Before
- Tired and Unhappy, You Think of Houses
- In the Slight Ripple, The Mind Perceives the Heart
- Concerning the Synthetic Unity of Apperception
- Parlez-Vous Francais?
- By Circumstances Fed
- A Young Child and His Pregnant Mother
- Prothalamion
- Faust in Old Age
- Sonnet: The Ghosts of James and Peirce in Harvard Yard
- Sonnet: O City, City
- What Is To Be Given
- For the One Who Would Take Man's Life in His Hands
- For the One Who Would Not Take His Life in His Hands
- Saint, Revolutionist
- Cambridge, Spring 1937
- Socrates' Ghost Must Haunt Me Now
- The Ballet of the Fifth Year
2. The Repetitive Heart: Poems In Imitation Of The Fugue
- All of Us Always Turning Away for Solace
- Will You Perhaps Consent To Be
- All Clowns Are Masked and All Personae
- Calmly We Walk through This April's Day
- Dogs Are Shakespearean, Children Are Strangers
- Do the Others Speak of Me Mockingly, Maliciously?
- I Am to My Own Heart Merely a Serf
- Abraham and Orpheus, Be With Me Now
- The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me
- A Dog Named Ego, the Snowflakes as Kisses
- Time's Dedication
3. Coriolanus and His Mother: A Dream Of Knowledge
- Act One: "O Me! Make You a Sword of Me!"
- Pleasure
- Act Two: "His Soaring Insolence, the Common Muck"
- Justice
- Act Three: "There Is a World Elsewhere"
- There Was a City
- Act Four, Scene One: "Like to a Lonely Dragon"
- Choose
- Act Four, Scene Two: "A Goodly House, the Feast Smells Well"
- He Is a Person
- Act Five: "As If a Man Were Author of Himself"
II. Summer Knowledge
4. The Fulfillment
- At a Solemn Musick
- Darkling Summer, Ominous Dusk, Rumorous Rain
- The Fulfillment
- The First Morning of the Second World
- Summer Knowledge
5. Morning Bells
- “I Am Cherry Alive,” the Little Girl Sang
- O Child, Do Not Fear the Dark and Sleep's Dark Possession
- The True-Blue American
- The Would-Be Hungarian
- Is It the Morning? Is It the Little Morning?
- A Small Score
- A Little Morning Music
6. The Kingdom of Poetry
- Gold Morning, Sweet Prince
- Vivaldi
- Sterne
- Swift
- Holderlin
- Baudelaire
- The Kingdom of Poetry
- Seurat's Sunday Afternoon along the Seine
7. The Deceptive Present, The Phoenix Year
- The World Was Warm and White When I Was Born
- I Am a Book I neither Wrote nor Read
- The Conclusion
- The Sequel
- The Dark and Falling Summer
- The Winter Twilight, Glowing Black and Gold
- All of the Fruits Had Fallen
- The Foggy, Foggy Blue
- I Did Not Know the Truth of Growing Trees
- All of Them Have Gone Away, Although They Once Were Near
- I Did Not Know the Spoils of Joy
- I Waken to a Calling
- The Deceptive Present, The Phoenix Year
- May's Truth and May's Falsehood
- How Strange Love Is, in Every State of Consciousness
- The Mounting Summer, Brilliant and Ominous
- During December's Death
- A Dream of Winter, Empty, Woolen, Ice-White and Brittle
- In the Green Morning, Now, Once More
8. The Phoenix Choir
- Once and for All
- Cupid’s Chant
- Psyche Pleads with Cupid
- Narcissus:
- - The Mind Is An Ancient And Famous Capital
- - The Fear And Dread Of The Mind Of The Others
- - The River Was The Emblem Of All Beauty: All
- Abraham
- Sarah
- Jacob
- Lincoln
- Starlight Like Intuition Pierced the Twelve

✦ Subjects

American poetry, symbolism, postmodernism, alcoholism, Delmore Schwartz, Coriolanus, Hamlet, Far Rockaway, Socrates, Shakespeare, Vivaldi, Sterne, Jonathan Swift, Holderlin, Baudelaire, Seurat, alcoholism