SOURCE: "More on Delmore," in Partisan Review, Vol. 54, No. 3, 1987, pp. 497-502.

Shechner is an American educator and critic who specializes in Jewish-American literature. In the following essay, he reviews Portrait of Delmore: Journals and Notes of Delmore Schwartz: 1939–1959.

It is possible to feel overwhelmed by Delmore Schwartz in death as it was in life. Twenty years after his death on July 11, 1966, the movement to resurrect Schwartz has taken an aggressive turn. The publication of his journals is just a ripple in the tide of Schwartziana that has been swelling since 1975, when Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift brought Schwartz back into public consciousness as the kibbitzer maudit and insomniac laureate of his age. That wave includes Robert Phillips's edition of Schwartz's Letters, published in 1984; Schwartz's Last and Lost Poems (1979); the collection of "bagatelles," The Ego is Always at the Wheel (1986); James Atlas's Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet...