A new edition of Delmore Schwartz is out. I know the poet only from Hayden Carruth’s anthology, The Voice That is Great Within Us. But “For the One Who Would Take Man’s Life in His Hands” strikes me as the work of a gifted poet.
The poet says that Samson, Othello, Christ and others were broken by love or by anger. An act of love caused Troy to burn. There are no pure acts. Every act carries with it the seeds of its own downfall.
You cannot sit on bayonets,
Nor can you eat among the dead.
When all are killed, you are alone.
A vacuum comes when hate has fed.
The poets says that Socrates took both sides of the argument. He was a soldier and a lover. He embraced love and war, not the either-or.
What do all examples show?
What can any actor know?
The contradiction in every act.
The infinite task of the human heart.
The book on Schwartz is that his early promise collapsed into alcoholism and mental illness. Dwight Garner, writing in The New York Times, says that people know him today from James Atlas’s biography, which is almost 50 years old, or Saul Bellow’s fictional portrait in Humboldt’s Gift.
Not me. I owe Carruth.
• Sources: The Voice That is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, edited by Hayden Carruth; New York: Bantam Classics, 1983. “For the One Who Would Take Man’s Life in His Hands” is on pp. 366-7.
The site All Poetry has it here:
https://allpoetry.com/For-The-One-Who-Would-Take-Man's-Life-In-His-Hands
Dwight Garner, “Delmore Schwartz’s Poems Are Like Salt Flicked on the World”; The New York Times, April 8, 2024. It’s a review of The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz, edited by Ben Mazer; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024.
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