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1 session / $100
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There was a time, in the 1930s and early 1940s, when Delmore Schwartz was the most important poet in America. This course on Delmore Schwartz, taught by Ben Mazer, editor of The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), will focus on the text of Schwartz’s poems. Students will discover, through a close reading of Schwartz's previously unpublished poems, his unique talent, one that perhaps raises him above his better-remembered mid-century contemporaries Robert Lowell and John Berryman.
Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966) was raised in Brooklyn, New York. A brilliant poet, short-story writer, and literary talent, he contributed “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” to Partisan Review. His books include Shenandoah and Other Verse Plays; the works of poetry Genesis: Book One and Summer Knowledge; and the short-fiction collections The World Is a Wedding and Successful Love and Other Stories. Schwartz taught at Syracuse University, Princeton University, and Kenyon College, and received the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry in 1959.
Class modality: Online synchronous (real-time attendance required)
Required textbook purchases: No
Recorded: No
Writing: No
Workshopping & feedback: No
Ben Mazer was born in New York City in 1964 and raised in and around Cambridge, Massachusetts. He studied poetry with Seamus Heaney at Harvard, and completed his MA and Ph.D under Christopher Ricks and Archie Burnett at the Editorial Institute, Boston University. Mazer has published more than ten collections of poetry, including most recently The Ruined Millionaire (MadHat Press). He has also edited several collections of poetry, including Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (Harvard University Press), The Collected Poems of John Crowe Ransom (Un-Gyve Press), and this year's The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A limited number of need-based scholarships are available to cover the enrollment costs of Poetry Society classes. To receive and fill out a scholarship survey, email parker@poetrysociety.org.
