News at Eleven: Though [Delmore] Schwartz studied philosophy

with Sidney Hook at New York University and did graduate work with Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard from 1935 to 1937, his inner bent was toward poetry. He was also a brilliant talker and a restless, omnivorous reader. According to William Phillips, who met him in the 1930s, "one felt immediately one was in the presence of a strange and possessed being, endowed with some extraordinary nervous and intellectual energy." Schwartz developed a prodigious mastery of poetic forms and a remarkable fluency at deploying them, but the influence of modern masters, especially Yeats and Eliot, kept him from becoming a genuinely original poet. His real breakthrough as a writer came one hot July weekend in 1935 when, at the age of 21, he wrote "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," its title borrowed from Yeats.

from Tablet: Growing Pains

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