Delmore Schwartz, a poet who is rarely read today or mentioned in discussions of American poetry, won the Bollingen Prize for 1959. It was announced on January 10, 1960, in New Haven, where the prize had settled (at Yale, that is) since the Pound controversy in 1949. Hard to believe DS was just 47 when he won, and indeed he was then the youngest Bollingen winner. He won it for his book Summer Knowledge (1959), which was an edition of selected poems. At the time he lived at 725 Greenwich Street in Manhattan, which is just across the street from my Jane.Later, in a 1979 review, a poet named Timothy Jahns, reviewing Last and Lost Poems of Delmore Schwartz, wrote that for Schwartz "it was all downhill from 1938, though his contemporaries kept on praising him." The editor of that posthumous volume noted that he (the editor) had "rescued" the work in that book, a tacit admission that DS had already long ago faded from poetic view.
In a journal entry dated August 15, 1959, Schwartz pondered the poetic value of Wallace Stevens: "Stevens's incomparable discoveries--S. has some fine things of his own to say--grace & honesty & courage--a good second-rate poet--". In the same entry, he wrote: "It's time to cultivate resignation." (Was it a non-sequitur?)
After the Bollingen was announced, DS gave a reading at Yale, where he reunited with Cleanth Brooks. And back in New York, he lunched with Robert Penn Warren.
In a review of Summer Knowledge published in the Nation on June 11, 1960, M. L. Rosenthal put his finger on it: "It is easy to say what has always been wrong with Delmore Schwartz' poetry. Briefly, he has rarely been able to sustain a whole poem at the level of its beginning. No one else but Auden in this century has so many wonderful first lines." Examples he gives: "In the naked bed, in Plato's cave," "The beautiful American word, Sure," "A dog named Ego, the snowflakes as kisses." And could there be a more enticing title than In Dreams Begin Responsibilities with its surrealist hint? "Unfortunately," MLR continues, "it is hard to remember any larger movement" after such openings. Once in a while there is more in Schwartz's poems "than unrelieved confessional or cosmic blarneying," but not often enough.
Is '60 the moment when the end of the end of the Old Left had been reached and the New Left began to emerge? Is it the final ascendancy, in certain scenes at least, of poetic postmodernity? Surely the publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry that year suggests this, but then again--once again--we look back on "New" here and see continuity. The rhetoric of the Kennedy-Nixon contest made much less of a dent than everyone (at the time as well as since) claimed, so one wonders why were such great claims made? 
Had we come to expect "1960" to be truly ubiquitously modern in a way that the 1950s really were not--not quite? And what specifically does "modern" mean in the Kennedyesque talk then and now about the torch being passed to a new generation, etc.? The First Lady really meant "modernist" when Camelotians said "modern." What about the others across the new young cultural leadership? I've been surprised by how frequently the 
"Beat movement" was covered in 1960 in the mainstream press. I was expecting a fair measure but I've found tonnage. 1960 was the year when the figure of the beat was beginning to find acceptance, although still 80% of these stories are mocking, rebels-without-cause condescension. For anyone whose analysis made an impact nationally, do these antipolitical adolescents count as part of the "new young cultural leadership"? No, but rather than the two being opposites, they fall along a Continuum of the New American. Now that's a change for '60.
