It is unfortunate, really, that Schwartz has filtered into the general public's consciousness more because of the outstanding copy his life has proved for other writers than because of his own work. Saul Bellow's superb roman à clef, Humboldt's Gift, was modelled loosely on his relations with Schwartz in the late Forties and early Fifties, and—his first book after winning the Nobel Prize—was a colossal seller. By now, most of those who knew him best have had their say. There are essays from many of the old Partisan crowd, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, William Barrett, Philip Rahv; a compassionate reminiscence from Harry Levin, who was much abused by Schwartz when they were neighbours in Cambridge in 1940; there are Lowell's elegies and Berryman's Dreamsongs, and even an awkward commemoration on his The Blue Mask album from Lou Reed, a student of Schwartz's at Syracuse in the early Sixties. And James Atlas's sensitive biography, published in 1977, provides an exhilarating mass of circumstantial evidence about Schwartz's day-to-day existence.

But the best introduction to his achievement remains his extraordinary first book. He really was onto something, though it's difficult even now to say exactly what:

       In the naked bed, in Plato's cave,
       Reflected headlights slowly slid the wall,
       Carpenters hammered under the shaded
                    window,
       Wind troubled the window curtains all night
                      long,
       A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding,
       Their freights covered, as usual.
       The ceiling lightened again, the slanting
                    diagram
       Slid slowly forth.
                  Hearing the milkman's chop,
       His striving up the stair, the bottle's chink,
       I rose from bed, lit a cigarette,
       And walked to the window …

It is perhaps the earnestness of this that is its most appealing feature, its implicit faith in poetry. It teems with echoes of Eliot, Yeats, Auden, Baudelaire, but, as in much of Eliot's own earlier work, the poem's intentness acts as a kind of crucible for each of the borrowings, making them seem like urgent data needing to be processed and understood by anyone with a serious interest in remaining alive in the modern world. Schwartz is describing his recurring insomnia, but the lines are at once rigorously impersonal and absolutely self-confident. The poem's subject is anxiety, guilt, doubt, but the poetry itself is authoritative and precise. Schwartz admired the way the early Auden could evoke atmospheres of imminent crisis with a jokey, fluent detachment, and in his excellent essay 'The Two Audens' he pictured Auden plugging into England's 'collective unconscious … delivering its obsessions to the page'. These lines certainly covet that ability.

Pretty well all of Schwartz's best work is overwritten, almost violently so. His short story 'In Dreams Begin Responsibilities', for instance, which first made his name, heading the opening issue of the newly revived Partisan Review in 1937 in front of contributions from Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, and even Picasso, has an intensity that seems both unique to Schwartz and bound up with its own moment of composition. There is nothing in it from which one might learn how to compose short stories, or how to achieve certain effects. Schwartz was 21 when he wrote it, and part of its charm and power certainly derives from its gaucheness, its schoolboy earnestness. Though it aims to be wise in a passionate, Dostoevskian way, it really succeeds through its awkwardness and innocence. The domestic situation which 'In Dreams Begin Responsibilities' describes—the incompatibility of his mother and father from the very moment of their engagement—was Schwartz's major theme. Especially touching is the way the story seems to be driven by a kind of misplaced confidence in the omnipotence of art: the 'divine vibrations' Nabokov admired in it perhaps derive from the firmness of this trust. But as Schwartz went on, exploring his family's miseries over and over, in verse plays, lyrics, more stories, across the two hundred numbing pages of Genesis: Book 1, he never found himself quite able to discover within his life's vicissitudes the Wordsworthian coherence he so desired. As a child, he suffered a great deal from his parents' unhappy marriage, and was often treated as a pawn in their wranglings. His father was rarely at home, and had endless affairs. In addition, there were all the cultural dilemmas of first-generation Jewish immigrants to be endured. His personal history, Schwartz felt, which had complicated his character to the point of neurosis, would surely receive some sort of ultimate justification and annealment in the perfection of his art—a common thought since Edmund Wilson, but one that few successful artists can ever have taken as seriously as Schwartz did.

Passionate for absolutes, he expanded it into the full-blooded conception of the poet as Christ-like hero in the capitalist wilderness, involved in a continual act of unacknowledged self-sacrifice for the common good. He described how the modern poet 'must dedicate himself to poetry, although no one else seems likely to read what he writes; and he must be indestructible as a poet until he is destroyed as a human being'—a comment that might be funny if it weren't so sincere.

The irony was that Schwartz was quite incapable of exploiting his sufferings to artistic effect. His artistic friends have proved much better at these sufferings. His gifts were lyrical, not narrative or dramatic. None of the fictional personae he invented for himself really connects his life to his work, as happens in Lowell or Berryman. Essentially Schwartz was, like Dylan Thomas, a dazzling phrase-maker. His first lines were usually his best, and these often became the poems' titles: 'Dogs are Shakespearean, Children are strangers', 'In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave', 'The Beautiful American Word, Sure'. Phrases like these, and sometimes whole poems, are exciting for no single clear reason, although probably most important is the way they seem to subdue the needs of the individual sensibility in favour of an awareness of the possibilities of language for its own sake. Disparate and vatic, they aim vaguely at some private, or perhaps universal, angst: but most of the poems' pleasures remain contingent on the strange convolutions of imagery and syntax in individual lines or phrases.

Given the unstable nature of his talent, Schwartz's assault on the long poem was doomed from the start. But by the time he began Genesis he had read Freud—according to William Barrett, this was the central disaster of his life—and the Family Romance seemed the answer to all his problems, the obvious, indeed the only possible plot. His earlier work is, to use his own phrase for Auden, full of 'the residue of undigested meaning', but Schwartz's middle poems and stories tend more towards tedious psychologising. Genesis is a family history; by detailing the exploits of grandparents, uncles, cousins, aunts, Schwartz seems to have hoped to establish once and for all his identity and the sources of his genius: while the story of their emigration is interesting enough, however, the touchingly absurd poetry and Biblical prose in which it is told never ignite. Schwartz's reputation suffered for it on all fronts. His publisher James Laughlin was unenthusiastic, Auden advised him not to publish, and, when it did come out in 1943, it received, at best, tepidly polite reviews.

Schwartz never abandoned poetry. In fact, over the next twenty years he wrote reams of it, much of it still unpublished—Yale's manuscript library has twenty or so large boxes of his papers, including hundreds of pages of the typescript for Genesis: Book II. And much of it makes eerie reading. As his life fell apart, and the exhaustive doses of Nembutal, Seconal and alcohol with which he combated his insomnia took their toll, and as his fits of paranoia and mania became more frequent, his poetry grew eccentrically chirpy and spontaneous:

      'I am cherry alive,' the little girl sang,
      'Each morning I am something new …'

Schwartz's literary executor, Robert Philips, thinks this is one of Schwartz's permanent contributions to 20th-century American poetry, but I don't think he can be serious. There are occasional strikes, such as 'Mr. Seurat's Sunday Afternoon', and he never lost his gift for good titles ('Dusk shows us what we are and hardly mean'), but most of his later poems are too loosely put together to conceal their baffled inner emptiness. Conceived as the unchecked effusions of a naive lyricism, they too often end up sounding like bad imitations of early Roethke. Dwight Macdonald acutely spoke of Schwartz's 'invincible innocence'. In his later life he grew both violently suspicious—it was Schwartz who coined the aphorism 'Even paranoiacs have real enemies'—and litigious, and slapped trumped-up writs on all his old friends: but his poetry from these years seems to yearn ever more nostalgically for the sweet and pristine.

His critical faculties, on the other hand, never really deserted him. Schwartz wrote a great quantity of good criticism during his life, mainly essays and reviews. Books on Eliot and Fitzgerald were advertised, but never appeared. His critical prose tends towards the orotund—Eliot's criticism is the overwhelming model—but it can also be shrewd and personal. Schwartz studied the literary stock-market like a broker, monitoring reputations as they dropped a point, gained a point, and this gives his assessments of his contemporaries—he never wrote on earlier authors—a certain relish. 'Pound is not as learned as he seems to be,' he cautions, before predicting the Cantos' 'immense usefulness for future writing'. His high seriousness rarely unbent, even when he became film-reviewer for The New Republic in the mid-Fifties. His joke-free cultural analyses of Mary Pickford and Marilyn Monroe are perceptive.

Schwartz did feel, however, that he had a lighter vein to cultivate. The ego is always at the wheel (another brilliant title) is a selection of bagatelles he wrote mainly in the late Forties and early Fifties; about half were previously published in magazines and Schwartz's Vaudeville for a Princess collection (1950), which inventively interspersed poetry and prose, while half were found among his papers. The previously unpublished essays are especially baffling. It's hard to imagine anyone, let alone Schwartz, sitting down to write these limp trifles except on commission.

He was an explosive conversationalist and a great raconteur, but his attempts in these pieces at the middlebrow columnist's garrulous humour, as perfected by Thurber, Ring Lardner (one of Schwartz's heroes) or S. J. Perelman, are quite disastrous. The required tone of wide-eyed pedantry was simply alien to him. Most of the pieces in question convey a grimmer comedy—that of the self-conscious intellectual reaching for a populist style in order to escape for a while from his obsessions. Many are facetious descriptions of literary classics, without punch or point. Hamlet can only be understood 'if we suppose that everyone is roaring drunk from the beginning to the end of the play.' The only thing we can know for certain about Don Giovanni is that he 'was a Lesbian, that is to say, someone who likes to sleep with girls'. The definition of Existentialism is that 'no one else can take a bath for you.'

Others are personal reminiscences in which Schwartz dramatises himself as a picaresque innocent. 'The ego is always at the wheel' describes the cars in his life, from a 1929 Royal Coupé in 1929 to a 1936 Buick in 1949, and how the dealers rooked him on each trade-in. In another, he is hired by Ma Bell to lecture her junior executives on The Brothers Karamazov, in the hope of reducing 'patterns of over-conformity' among the staff. Schwartz is unable to appear natural or at ease in these pieces, and it is hard to believe that each one underwent numerous revisions. Even the best, a description of adolescent gloom following a precocious immersion in Spengler's The Decline of the West and a violent dip in the fortunes of the Giants, has a dispiriting vagueness to it. Though the Giants buy the formidable batter Rogers Hornsby in the close season, they still miss out on the Pennant race the following year. Schwartz concludes:

It is now years since I first became aware that the reality of the future was very likely to be very different than any present image or expectation: Yet this awareness, recognition, or knowledge are likely to be astonishing and unpredictable in many ways so essentially the same as they were so long ago that I must make an admission which may be a confession: Experience has taught me nothing.

The publication of these curiosities now can only re-affirm the drift of this self-analysis, and deepen our awareness of the extraordinary misunderstandings that accompanied Schwartz's enormous original talent.