BOOKS
puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge, but I
suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge
is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness
along proj ected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it
happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately ,
but let wh at will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the
fi elds. No acquirement is on assignment, or even self–
assignment. Knowledge of the second kind is much more
available in the wild free ways of wit and art. A schoolboy may
be defin ed as one who can tell you what he knows in the order in
which he learned it. The artist mu st value himself as he snatches
a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new
order with no t so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place
where it was organic.
RACHEL HADAS
MORE ON DELMORE
497
PORTRAIT OF DELMORE: JOURNALS AND NOTES OF DELMORE
SCHWARTZ: 1939- 1959. Edited and Introduced by Elizabeth Pollett.
Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. $35.00.
It is possible to feel overwhelmed by Delmore Schwartz in
death as it was in life. Twenty years after his death onJuly 11,1966,
the movement to resurrect Schwartz has taken an aggressive turn.
The publication of his journals is just a ripple in the tide of Schwart–
ziana that has been swelling since 1975, when Saul Bellow's
Hum–
boldt's Gift
brought Schwartz back into public consciousness as the
kibbitzer maudit and insomniac laureate of his age. That wave in–
cludes Robert Phillips's edition of Schwartz's
Letters,
published in
1984; Schwartz's
Last and Lost Poems
(1979); the collection of "baga–
telles,"
The Ego is Always at the Wheel
(1986); James Atlas's
Delmore
Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet
(1977); the extended portrait of
Schwartz in William Barrett's
The Truants
(1982); and Bruce Bawer's
essay on Schwartz's poetry in
The Middle Generation: The Lives and
Poetry
oj
Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and Robert
Lowell
(1986) . Virtually forgotten after his death, Schwartz has now
been brought back to life as a symbol ofJewish intellectual life and a
small but vigorous cottage industry.
