492
PARTISAN REVIEW
never without their weaknesses and occasional shortcomings. Among
Schuyler's, the consciously courted slackness oftone has already been men–
tioned, and the touching sincerity of his work sometimes shades over into
sentimentality and self-pity. But a case cou ld be made that there is a more
serious problem with Schuyler's verse, a problem he shares with the New
York school in general: that his poetry is too often just too easy to under–
stand. "A poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully," is the verdict
of another word-painter, Wallace Stevens. Reflecting this requirement, the
strongest poem in this book seems to me to be the sad and sobering "The
Crystal Lithium," wherein the abundance of the world which the pot has
celebrated elsewhere is seen as cruel and claustrophobic confusion. The
central conceit is that a walk on the beach in winter gives one a taste of how
the world looks to a man obliged to take lithium in order to maintain some
sort of mental equilibrium:
. . . the heat is on because the cold is all
About as though, swimming under water, in clearly fishy
water, you
Inhaled and found one could live and also found you
altogether
Did not like it ...
Nowhere in Schuyler's work are his difficult circumstances treated
more matter-of-factly, and nowhere is his emotional distance from the world
he loves and that torments him more clearly felt. The poem raises the
possibility that if the best art is unemotional, still the attitude necessary to its
composition might be the symptom ofa sickness all its own, an ambiguity that
makes for added complexity and pathos. "Thereof come in the end despon–
dency and madness," and sad to say, one senses toward the close of
Schuyler's
Selected Poems
that his fragility has tired him out. But the moving,
disturbing and eloquent message of his work is that, if an artist is good
enough, a certain despondency wi ll have been part of the mix all along.
Schuyler tells us that the true artist's madness is not a mania. Instead it is the
detachment oflong perspective, and as such it is not an endpoint or a by–
product; it is a prerequisite.
GEORGE BRADLEY
