with Alma and James Agee (1938)
Jonathan Galassi from "The Troubling Genius of Delmore," NYRB (June 23, 1916)
The critic Michael Clune has written about Ashbery that the basic unit of his poetic practice is not the book, or even the poem, but the line. I think the same can be said for Delmore; apart from his few best poems, what really stays with the reader are individual lines, some of them employed, with slight variations, as titles:
The heavy bear who goes with me…
In the naked bed, in Plato’s cave…
The beautiful American word, Sure…
Tired and unhappy, you think of houses…
We are Shakespearean, we are strangers.
The mind is a city like London, Smoky and populous…
The actual is like a moist handshake, damp with nervousness or the body’s heat.
It’s impossible to gainsay the brilliance of these phrases, even when great poems fail to rise out of them. As Pollet said of Delmore’s voluminous diaries: “He begins the journals conscious of it as a literary form and therefore conscious of a potential audience. But the focus and coherence this implies is [sic] not sustained.” For Pollet he was sometimes “the poet, the Orpheus, transcending this world to make music out of things he alone had penetrated to and heard”; at others, he was “the wounded genius, the heavy bear of his poems, the naïf scheming to be practical in impractical ways.”
*****
In his best work, Delmore lives on perpetually young, perpetually aspiring and anxious, and its power and intensity keep on creating disciples. Lou Reed, a student at Syracuse in his last years, said, “I wanted to write. One line as good as yours. My mountain. My inspiration.”
Let Berryman have the last word:
The spirit & the joy, in memory
live of him on, the young will read his young verse
for as long as such things go…
