The Poetry of Delmore Schwartz

"The corpus of Schwartz's work makes only the slightest bow to tradition; it is as if competing clarities invite the reader's rejection on the ground that the whole carnival of attitudes roams his pages like a group of nomads-without the architecture of home. No order but the order of discovery seemed appropriate for handling a writer who, though refusing to fall easily into a tradition, was too sophisticated to be called primitive. The handling of such a problem appears to be a straightforward examination of his books of poetry in the order in which they were published." from the Introduction