Abstract
In the summer of 1943, in the midst of the Second World War, Schwartz wrote to his publisher, James Laughlin, embracing Laughlin’s proposal that they set up a magazine together. It should be titled New Europe, Schwartz suggested, and it should be based upon the hypothesis “that Europe is through, but that something has to be done to carry on the greatness of European culture.” Its articles would carry out a “large-scale attack on popular culture” and would attempt to “overcome the gulf between popular culture and advance guard culture” by taking seriously “Hollywood, Broadway, popular novels, comic strips, NY Times editorials and poems, the prose of Time, and the photos of Life.” The whole project would be founded upon the assumption that “Europe is the greatest thing in America … but the next greatest thing in America is Hollywood; and between these two large-scale cultural factors, the future of culture lies” (DS & JL Letters, 214–215). Ultimately, Schwartz implies, establishing the new magazine would constitute a stage in enabling America to become the sanctuary of Western civilization.
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Notes
William Phillips and Philip Rahv, “Literature in a Political Decade,” in New Letters in America ed. Horace Gregory and Eleanor Clark (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937), 172–180. Cited in
Terry A. Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circl, 1934–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 92.
Cited in Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 4.
Christopher Hitchens, “Bravo, Old Sport,” London Review of Books, April 4, 1991.
Leon Trotsky, “Leon Trotsky to André Breton,” Partisan Review 6, no. 2 (Winter 1939): 127.
William Phillips and Philip Rahv, “Editorial Statement,” Partisan Review 4, no. 1 (December 1937): 4.
Delmore Schwartz, Letters of Delmore Schwartz ed. Robert Phillips (Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1984), 101.
Jim Keller, “Delmore Schwartz’s Strange Times,” in Reading The Middle Generation Anew, ed. Eric Haralson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 158.
Stephen Hahn, “The Isolation of Delmore Schwartz,” Columbia Literary Columns 40, no. 1 (November 1990): 24.
Delmore Schwartz, “Ezra Pound and History” (1960), in Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, 116.
Ezra Pound, Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), 549.
W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1976), 101.
Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870– 1930 (1931), (London: Collins, 1969), 39.
Delmore Schwartz, “Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews,” Contemporary Jewish Record 7, no. 1 (February 1944): 14.
Benjamin Schreier, “Ethnic Poetics and the Irreversibility of ‘Jewishness’ in Delmore Schwartz,” in Studies in Irreversibility: Texts and Contexts, ed. Benjamin Schreier (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 68.
John Hollander, “The Question of American Jewish Poetry,” in What is Jewish Literature?, ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1994), 43
Maeera Y. Shreiber, “Jewish American Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, ed. Michael P. Kramer and Hana Wirth-Nesher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 150.
Anthony Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2.
Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 267.
Ibid. See also Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s chapter on “‘Wondering Jews’: Melting-Pots and Mongrel Thoughts,” in Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). DuPlessis argues that, in conflating Jewish figures like Bleistein with the Black/Irish Sweeney, Eliot creates “a poetic mongrel” (152). Despite his disgust, she suggests, Eliot “wants to claim the passions and energies of their presence for his work and culture” (154).
Delmore Schwartz, “Fiction Chronicle: The Wrongs of Innocence and Experience,” Partisan Review 19, no. 3 (May–June, 1952): 358.
See Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of The United States of America, revised ed. (London: Penguin, 2001), 554.
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© 2014 Alex Runchman
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Runchman, A. (2014). “The Greatest Thing in North America”: “International Consciousness” or “The Isolation of Modern Poetry?”. In: Delmore Schwartz. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137394385_2
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