Delmore Schwartz is a haunting reminder of the travails—or roller-coaster rides—of reputation. He burst onto the literary scene in 1938, some years before his peers, with the poems, verse play, and short story of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938). The reactions were all a poet could wish for. Allen Tate wrote Schwartz before publication that his “poetic style is . . . the first real innovation that we’ve had since Eliot and Pound,” and Wallace Stevens something similarly head-turning. (In a letter two years later, however, the great panjandrum of Hartford wrote a friend that Schwartz “is extremely keen: perhaps too keen.”)
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