POETRY CHRONICLE
SUMMER KNOWLEDGE, NEW AND SELECTED POEMS: 1938-
1958. By Delmore Schwortz. Doubledoy. $4.95.
KO, OR A SEASON ON EARTH. By Kenneth Koch. Grove. $1.75.
A volume of collected poems by Delmore Schwartz has
been long overdue. In the case of talents as early-flowering and
distinguished as his-he had published poems of real maturity
and found a definitive voice at an age when the best of the
post-war generation were still occupied with Czerny exercises–
retrospective views are always rewarding and sometimes startling.
As it is, we shall have to make do for a while with a carefully
pruned selection, framed in a very deliberate fashion. The ar–
rangement of this book is really more thematic than it is synoptic
or systematically chronological. The poems in the first half all
date from the time of
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938),
Mr. Schwartz's first book, with the addition of some material from
Genesis
and
Vaudeuille for a Princess.
A great deal of the first
book has been retained, including, I was glad to see, the long
poem "Coriolanus and his Mother", which with its prose entr'actes
and interpolated commentary by Freud, Aristotle and Marx ante–
dates "The Sea and the Mirror" of Auden and remains, I feel,
quite as distinguished an analogous work. All of these earlier
poems are gathered together under the heading of "The Dream
of Knowledge" (the subtitle of the Coriolanus poem). The
second section of the book, the "Summer Knowledge" itself, con–
sists almost exclusively of new poetry written during the past five
years, in sufficient quantity and quality to make up two impres–
sive enough volumes. The book closes with the misplaced "Star–
light Like Intuition Pierced the Twelve," by its author's own
admission his favorite lyric.
The effect of the selection and the arrangement is not to trace
anything like a stylistic development, but rather to proceed in a
kind of huge, perceptible quantum-jump from one poetic corpus
to another one. What most readers will agree in thinking of as
Delmore Schwartz's most characteristic mode
is
perhaps best ex–
emplified in poems like "In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave," "A
