[Delmore Schwartz] was an exceptionally able literary critic. Far too sophisticated intellectually and too much at home with conceptual matters to turn himself into an exponent of any given exclusive "method," he also understood the pitfalls to which critical discourse is exposed when it oversteps its limits to indulge in philosophical or sociological divagations. Sound in his literary judgments, he wrote without pretension or solemnity and without ever divesting himself of his fine and highly original sense of humor.

But it is precisely as a critic that he was grievously underrated, and for reasons not too difficult to identify. In the first place, readers were mainly aware of him as a poet and short story writer, and only marginally as a critic; and, secondly, he himself put no particular emphasis on his critical work, conceiving of himself as primarily a creative writer. Yet in no sense can he be considered an amateur in criticism; he wrote a great deal of it, quite as much as he wrote fiction. (p. 19)

At the age of twenty-four he had already written some of his finest poems as well as "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," the most captivating and, in the judgment of most people who know his work well, the best short story he was ever to compose. What is even more surprising is that in that very year he also published what, in my view, are three superb critical pieces: "The Critical Method of R. P. Blackmur" is a definitive essay; another is the long and thoroughly cogent analysis of Yvor Winters's Primitivism and Decadence; and still another, entitled "John Dos Passos and the Whole Truth," is as fair in its argument as it is perceptive of that novelist's strengths and weaknesses—perhaps the most plausible single evaluation of Dos Passos as yet available to us.

Now while it is well-known that many poets have produced their best work in their early twenties, it is only very rarely that a critic has contributed anything memorable at that age. Usually it is not until their early thirties that critics are able to write anything really substantial exhibiting a mature cast of mind. And this is exactly where the paradox of Schwartz's precocity calls attention to itself in a striking way. The criticism he wrote even as late as 1953 (such as "The Duchess' Red Shoes," for instance, an essay on Lionel Trilling as notable for its humor as for its insight into that critic's social bias) has enduring value, while the poetry he published in his thirties and forties is clearly inferior to his earlier work in that medium. Thus the thematic richness as well as the diction, versification, and rhythmic range of the verse contained in Vaudeville for a Princess (1950) is almost embarrasingly feeble in comparison with such earlier poems in his first collection as "The Heavy Bear that Goes with Me," "In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave," or "Tired and Unhappy, You Think of Houses."

The same goes for his later fiction. In my reading of it only four of his stories are truly superior: "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," "America!," "The Statues," and "A Bitter Farce," all written, I believe, before the age of thirty. Moreover, in the later stories, such as "The Child Is the Meaning of this Life" and those collected in his last volume Successful Love, the prose becomes flatter and flatter, the narrative movement slows down, dramatic impact is lost in tiresome repetitiousness; and in the novella The World Is a Wedding some of the characters are barely distinguishable from one another as they carry on a prolonged dialogue that is excessively, even compulsively, "literary" in the pejorative sense of that term. (pp. 19-20)

He was not endowed with the capacity to create a solid fictional world seemingly self-governing in structure and possessed of an energy supple enough to establish a necessary congruity between interior and external event and circumstance. In Schwartz's narratives the best writing (and effects) is mostly achieved in lyrical moments and in passages embodying the emotional and intellectual pathos of self-recognition or self-identification.

In other words, his fiction at its best is "personal" in a sense which seldom applies to good narrative prose. For this reason perhaps it is very revealing as biography, more so, it seems to me, than his poems, in which his obsessive search for his true self is transposed into a type of metaphor and image that tends to gloss over the specificity of the person writing in favor of a certain kind of indented generality about the human condition as a whole….

Schwartz's intricate inner life … might be described as a kind of unremitting self-reflexive internal labor … to which I believe both the origin and the imaginative source of his most expressive stories can be traced.

Consider the climactic scene in "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," where the protagonist, easily identifiable with the author himself, watching on the movie screen a series of incidents in the courtship of his future parents, stands up in the theater, much to the discomfiture of his neighbors in the audience, and loudly cries: "Don't do it. It's not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal and two children whose characters are monstrous." This startling intervention by the dreaming protagonist is by no means to be taken as a literary flourish, a finely devised ending, or some kind of symbolic statement concerning the human condition. It is the writer's adverse yet most intimate confession, the one psychodynamic form open to him for attaining transcendence….

Schwartz, in his more abstract musings, dreamed of a different kind of life, a life in which "the idea of love" held sway, but at the same time he was persuaded that "the ideas of success and failure are the two most important things in America." This distressing state of affairs, in which the real so crudely mocks the ideal, is among the more haunting themes of his creative work. (p. 20)

That he greatly admired Eliot's poetry goes without saying, but what struck me in his truly obsessive talk about Eliot was the note of suspicion it sounded, the elusive hints of literary politics and the gossipy stories that plainly had no foundation in fact about the man behind the career, a man, by the way, he had never known. There was something in these palpably absurd stories, abounding with "delusions of reference," to use a Freudian phrase, that contained in embryo the paranoia that later overwhelmed him….

[As] he grew older his self-concern mounted, so much so that the tendency to ritualize, if I may put it that way, his own unhappiness became more and more marked in the later poetry and fiction. This may help to explain their evident flatness of style and debility of emotional force.

However, he did not falter to the same degree in his criticism. After all, the critical medium permits only a minimum of subjectivity. Moreover, in any case, regarding himself as a creative writer above all and therefore attaching no ultimate importance to articles and reviews, he was able to approach the writing of them with greater relaxation and, curiously enough, in a more disciplined spirit. On the surface his essays are marked by a kind of deceptive simplicity, yet an attentive reading cannot but verify their rare precision of statement and shrewdness of insight. (p. 21)

In his function as a critic Schwartz was far more disinterested than most of his contemporaries. Indifferent to "grand theory" and fashions in "methodology," he was singularly free of ideological prejudice. Also, he was sufficiently well-educated in philosophy to spot with ease the metaphysical presuppositions that some critics unknowingly let slip into their work…. Though highly sensitive to fallacies of discourse, he was never an unkind critic of the sort who is ever on the lookout for faults by way of displaying his superiority. Despite a certain moral insecurity that sometimes retarded his creative efforts, he not only understood literature thoroughly but also loved it passionately. (p. 22)