Even joyous passages, as in "The Kingdom of Poetry," are deeply tinged by fatalism. It is as if, true diagnostician that he was, [Delmore] was constantly remembering his depression in the midst of his mania, and vice versa.

This melancholy is deeply rooted in Delmore's view of history and the growth of self. For him, man is constantly shaped by unconscious or dimly perceived forces—as the melancholy commentators of Genesis and Coriolanus point out. Delmore never fixed on the precise ideology for this view of history: he had many different versions and the Choruses reflect them. What is clear from his work is that he believed that against History and the Unconscious the individual can claim only an illusory sense of freedom. Yet he must choose in order to assert his creative power, his dignity. The melancholy tone and theme lie in the tension between this determinism and the assertion of the necessity of freedom. The supreme act of freedom for Delmore was the creative act itself—which either flowed with manic excess or was squeezed painfully from his torpor. He was said to have remarked: "I write when manic, revise when depressed."

In one of his most lyrical poems, "Abraham and Orpheus," this melancholy determinism expresses itself in a form that is quintessentially Delmorean. There is in the poem a very simple lyric repetition which circles around a simple theme: the exhaustion of love and the heavy presence of time as a defeating force. The central image is of circular movement. Abraham and Orpheus (the moral and poetic imperatives, if you like) are presented as figures who act out of love, mystery, and ignorance of consequences. Although their actions are "the substance of care" they are "poised on nothing, weighted on the air," and they have an intuitive knowledge or faith in the rightness, or perhaps only the inevitability, of their actions. Thus the poet can invoke their "learned presence" as a comfort in his dilemma. That dilemma is never specifically named, and this vagueness is typical of Delmore's poems. Yet we somehow can intuit the situation: the evocation of loneliness, helplessness, philosophical and imaginative uncertainty, awareness of the infinite choices made in time.

In Genesis and Coriolanus these concerns are dramatized more concretely. But the resigned acceptance of the darkness and the ignorance of the Ego and Id are still present, as in "Abraham and Orpheus." The images in that poem, as in so many other lyrics …, have an uncertain focus, the dreamlike intensity of surrealism. (His stories, of course, develop this magnificently—"In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" and "The Statues" being two famous examples.) But I should guess that they derive less from "surrealism" than from the monumental symbolism of Yeats and the fragmented and allusive symbolism of Eliot. Typically, Delmore evokes images of the city that are both dehumanizing and terrifying but also form the backdrop for his heightened awareness of himself as vulnerable and fragile. They have [a] … disembodied, vacant quality…. They also express specifically Delmore's intense insomniac sense of the terrors of night and the qualified promises of early morning. (pp. 96-7)

[We note] his lyric evocations of solitude, of great imaginative masters, of obsession with being caught in a twilight world between past, present, and future. He is constantly dissolving the distinction between universal and personal history. Shadowy philosophers (Plato, Socrates, Marx, Freud, James, Whitehead, Aristotle) are evoked throughout his work to bear witness to events and moods that in themselves appear mysterious, impulsive, melancholy, retrospective. They are appealed to, in effect, to impose intellectual order on a patchwork and exhausted self that yet has immortal longings for beauty, tenderness, grace, and power. Yet these longings too often appear to disguise a brutish, angry, and resentful self…. [In "The Heavy Bear"] Delmore conceives of the self almost as a neo-Platonic spirit which begs release from the gross material (and the womb) enclosing it.

This imprisonment is found not only in the self but also in the family. The figure of the dominant but sinister father is everpresent, of course, in Genesis. But his symbolic presence is felt everywhere. He is softened in the philosopher-presences, but is still judging and overseeing. The mother is the soft, inviting figure for the child to hide in, to protect him from the father and the turbulent complexities of the outside world, especially the world of the city. Moreover, the family itself is connected to the concept of historical determinism, the family and history forming an intricate tissue that the poet cannot escape from, though he would like to. As in "The Ballad of the Children of the Czar," Delmore places the psychological issue clearly in the historical context: that of his own Rumanian grandfather, the events of the Russian revolution, and his family's uncertain place in America…. [The] antagonism between his tormented self—willful, impulsive, yet knowing his own psychological entrapment—and his view of history as "unforgiven," as a determinist force that he cannot escape, and of his family that he is inextricably if rebelliously part of, is the dominant theme of Delmore's work. He is—though the phrase is overworked—the Alienated Man.

Yet there is a strong countermovement to this alienation. It is his romantic lyricism, deeply melancholy but at the same time celebrating the transcendent power of the self over circumstance and the very determinism that oppresses him. This lyric transcendence is best expressed in the title of his selected poetry—Summer Knowledge. Specifically, it is the idea of ripeness, the full maturity of a moment of perception that sees life as beautiful and whole and precious. This reaches one peak in the prose interlude in Coriolanus called "Pleasure," in which he evokes the joys of being alive as a response to the tragedy of Coriolanus himself. Yet one should note that even here, in his manic phase, so to speak, Delmore knows that he must recall the everpresence of the deterministic and tragic.

Pleasure believes in friends, pleasure creates communities, pleasure crumbles faces into smiles, pleasure links hand in hand, pleasure restores, pain is the most selfish thing. And yet, I know, all this is nothing, nothing consoles one, and our problem and pain are still before us. (pp. 98-100)

Delmore's lyric and romantic hope should be viewed as equipoised throughout his work against the despairing certainty of a deterministic and hopelessly entangled ego, itself caught within the net of history and family. The poet's task is essentially "a fixed hallucination / Made by the passion of imagination," as the Chorus finally comments on the plight of the "Sleepless Atlantic Boy," Hershey Green, at the end of Genesis. The central perception left in that poem is that all experience is passing and is to be held in deep suspicion at the same instant that it is relished. (pp. 100-01)

Much could be said negatively about Delmore's elaboration of commonplace ideas [in his criticism]. Yet the very fact that he takes pains to remind his readers of what they may take for granted is a sign of the importance the issues had for him. Modernism, in fact, is the condition which Delmore thought he must define and redefine, no matter if the subject be meter or metaphor, or the themes typical of the pre-Romantic or post-Romantic imaginations…. He argues with great precision and a sense of the importance of the commonplace, for instance, that from the "isolation of poetic sensibility the obscurity of modern poetry also arises."… [As] an extremely tactful essayist, he steadfastly avoids discussing himself or his own work. In this fastidiousness he is like his critical and poetic mentor, Eliot, whose authoritative detachment he consistently admired. (p. 101)

Delmore made [a conscious effort] as a critic to be generous to both the ideas and the particular forms that poets and poems took. He was faithful to his sense of history and to the infinite ways poets took in interacting with history. At the same time that he succeeded so admirably in the primary task of the critic to be a good elucidator and a generous spirit, he also succeeded in commenting indirectly on his own dilemmas as a poetic man. He saw his fellow artists as he saw himself—trying to find a language faithful to the particular torments of our time that his own life so tragically embodied. (pp. 102-03)