Delmore Schwartz - Once and for All - The Best of Delmore Schwartz

“Rocks, moss, stone-crop, iron, merds,” as Eliot writes in one poem, are instances of actual things. But it would be wrong to suppose that things are more actual than feelings or motives. “I don’t like eggs; I never liked eggs” is an instance of how colloquial speech brings us an actual person, or a definite time and place. “Disordered papers in a dusty room” are an instance of the decay and disorder of the actual.

Yet the sense of the actual is narrow and deceptive when the actual is identified or limited to the sordid, the squalid, and the dirty. On the other hand, it is the refusal to admit or pay attention to this aspect of the actual which makes many human beings shut their eyes, draw the window shades, or seek out the many other devices for escaping from reality. Thus it is significant that in some of Eliot’s early poems there is an effort to satirize the genteel in speech and in manners. But if “carious teeth” are actual, the “inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold” is just as actual. And order is as actual as disorder. We are wrong only when we take the aspiration or the wish for order for actual order.

Hence Eliot as a critic speaks of the peculiar honesty of the great poet. This honesty is the moral quality of mind which insists upon knowing what is actual, no matter how unpleasant the judgement may be.

The actual eludes formulation because it is the foundation for all formulation and for all statements about what is true and what is not true. One must attempt definition merely by pointing. In the end, one must point to the color, blue, in order to identify it, and this pointing is useless, too, to the blind.

The sense of the actual must be refreshed repeatedly, and in the course of this book, the reader ought to try what is said and what is cited by invoking his own sense of what is actual. As the reader continues to examine Eliot’s work and this effort to describe his work, the actual and the sense of the actual will turn out repeatedly to be the very heart, the inner warmth and source of movement, of the subject.

The progress of poetry — the process by which one method and style of writing is succeeded by a new one — is inspired by the way a given convention of style that once made possible the experience of the actual has been made habitual and stock, to the point at which, instead of helping the poet to arrive at the actual, it is a block or barrier between him and his subject. It is also a barrier between a new kind of poetry and a reader who is devoted to the style of a previous period. The style and idiom of Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poetry was the barrier which Eliot had to break through when he began to write poetry, and it was precisely the familiarity with this kind of poetry which made his new work seem wrong and unpoetic to habitual readers of poetry. Such a scorn is natural because it is natural for the reigning taste to take for granted and proclaim its universality.

1. Schwartz seems to have wanted to cut this bracketed portion, having handwritten the brackets and crossed it out on the typescript.

2. In the manuscript there is an illegible handwritten correction above “his best friend.”

3. There is more illegible handwriting around “would not feel.”

4. Schwartz’s brother’s name was actually Kenneth.

5. In the manuscript, “two thousand” is changed to “ten thousand.”

6. In the manuscript, “much more delicacy” is changed to “infinite tact.”

7. This couplet is inserted here in the manuscript with no explanation: “One of the low on whom assurance sits/Like a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.”

To Ezra Pound

73 Washington Place

New York City

April 9, 1938

Dear Mr. Pound,

It was a very great pleasure to receive your letter. I am idolatrous or perhaps the word is “superstitious,” and one of my superstitions is the great poet, especially the three or four who are not yet dead. Your corrections of my piece in Poetry are thus very welcome, and I hope that you will be moved to correct me in the future. 1But you will not mind, I am sure, if I try to explain more exactly the notions to which you are objecting.

First, however, to answer your question about George Dillon and Poetry . Dillon is a very weak poet and not in the least intelligent. He was Harriet Monroe’s pet child, he won the Pulitzer Prize once, and he translated with Edna St. Vincent Millay all of Baudelaire very poorly (using an alexandrine in English because Baudelaire used it in French). It is no exaggeration to say that he knows nothing. This obviously puts him in the same class as Harriet Monroe, and he seems to have like her one saving virtue, only one, the willingness to give all parties a chance to speak their pieces, and I should guess that he will be more or less as amenable to your desires as Harriet Monroe was. I for one have never been able to understand how you could tolerate so foolish a woman for so many years even with an ocean between the two of you. As for whether I was writing against the editor or with his consent, this question perplexes me. At any rate, I asked him to let me review your new book, expecting only two or three pages and he told me to write a long article, probably because he had read my long piece in the Southern Review in which I put Yvor Winters in his place. When the piece was finished, he said it was very good, and this probably means that I was writing with his consent. As for what I as contributor intend to do about the sabotage of your labors, let me know what you would like me to do and I will probably do it. But I actually cannot see why you should be concerned at all about Poetry . It has had its day and that day is long past, was over in 1920, so far as exercising a genuine influence goes, and the future for that sort of thing belongs or is going to belong to J. Laughlin IV. He has the interests, the energy, the ability and the intelligence which are needed where Harriet Monroe seems to me to have had nothing but a vague desire to be helpful, and it is obvious to me that you can go on with your useful labors with much more ease and satisfaction now than ever before.

Now for your objections. “suppose you Read some of these writers before telling grandpa he ain’t been fotografted in his dress suit.” This is only a shot in the dark and a pretty poor one at that. I have read with much care and attention Dante, Homer and Shakespeare, and also, though not as fully, Ovid. One reason, in fact, that I studied Greek was your own translation from the Odyssey —if Homer was like that, I wanted to read all of him. I found out that he was not really like that and as a matter of fact even better. All literary judgement seems to me to be comparative and on this basis it still seems clear to me that the best “frame” for a long poem is narrative. I may be very naive and literal about it, but when you say that “The Divina Commedia has practically no narration and no plot/it presents a scheme of values/merely a walk upstairs to a balloon landing,” I can only keep in mind the literal fact that the poem in question is about a man who was lost in a dark wood where he met various animals and then a great poet’s ghost and learned that in order to escape from the wood and the animals, he would have to travel thru Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. And thus the enormous exaltation of the cantos toward the end of Purgatorio derives from the character of the story, the narrative that Dante is going to meet the lady with whom he was very much in love for a long time and who has been dead for ten years. I do not expect you to take over broken-down values from fat Aquinas nor in fact do I suppose that the absence of narrative in your poem as a whole is a simple thing, a pure matter of choice. It seems to me that narrative began to go out of poetry when Coleridge had to write marginal summaries for The Ancient Mariner and by the time we get to Sordello it has become even harder to tell a story and again there are marginal summaries (at least in some editions) and all this is, I think, a part of a whole complex of both history and literature, partly the increasing quest of certain poetic effects which must of necessity eliminate or at least halt the story narrative — could Mallarmé, for example, conceivably have told a story using his style; and partly the development of the novel as a way of getting everything about a character into a medium; and partly the very breakdown of those values which focus interest upon the life and death of the individual soul — thus even the novel now tells almost no story and the leading beliefs on all sides are, as in Marxism, beliefs about classes, not individuals, about history as a whole.