Schwartz, Delmore
Schwartz, Delmore ( 1913 – 68 ),poet and short story writer, born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn. He achieved early recognition with his family-dream story ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’, published in 1937 in the Partisan Review (which he was later to edit, 1943 – 55 ): this became the title work of a celebrated volume of stories and poems ( 1938 ). The World is a Wedding ( 1948 ) also collects stories. Shenandoah ( 1941 ) is a verse drama. Volumes of verse include Summer Knowledge ( 1959 ) and Last and Lost Poems ( 1979 ). Schwartz's decline into drinking and loneliness and his death in a cheap hotel room created a ‘doomed poet’ legend, and inspired elegies from Berryman : his exuberance is celebrated by Bellow in a portrait of him as Von Humboldt Fleisher in Humboldt's Gift.
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