Collected Poems [Hardcover]

James Schuyler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1993

The definitive edition of the poet's work, taken from the pages of the poet's published collections, includes Freely Espousing, Crystal Lithium, Hymn to Life, and The Home Book.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Born in Chicago in 1923, the late James Schuyler gravitated early on to Manhattan, where he came to be associated with such stalwarts of the New York School as Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery. Yet his work--unlike, say, Ashbery's, with whom he wrote a novel, A Nest of Ninnies--is eminently accessible. Indeed, Schuyler's Collected Poems functions as an exquisite illustration of how to write poetry with a crystal-clear surface. And he always remains a master of the light touch, even when he himself is in desperate straits.

In Schuyler's long pieces, such as "Hymn to Life," "The Morning of the Poem," and "A Few Days," he casually reverses the romantic position: anti-didactic, anti-epiphanic, he trusts his imagination and resists any psychological theorizing about why one memory, one perception, is connected to another. He mistrusts monumentality. Wisdom, he knows, is enervating: "Things should get better as you / grow older, but that / is not the way. The way is inscrutable and hard to / handle." But long or short, Collected Poems is a record of discoveries, and each one is marked by Schuyler's terrific antennae and gift of tonal rightness. (The same qualities are on ample, if more casual, display in the poet's diary.) There's no question that he is among the most formidable and most observant poets of postwar America. Indeed, his attractively quotidian elegy for W.H. Auden is a far more subtle poem than the endlessly quoted tour de force that Auden dedicated to W.B. Yeats:

I don't have to burn his
letters as he asked his
friends to do: they were lost
a long time ago. So much
to remember, so little to
say: that he liked martinis
and was greedy about the wine?
I always thought he would live
to a great age. He did not.
Wystan, kind man and great poet,
goodbye.

Nobody thought that James Schuyler would live to a great age. But the death of this "kind man and great poet" in 1991 felt no less cruelly premature. --Mark Rudman --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

This posthumous collection of Schuyler's (1923-1991) work will confirm the poet's mastery of a type of poem made famous by his friend Frank O'Hara in the late 1950s. Schuyler's subject is his life, and his poems often read like elegant journal entries. The book presents intimate and conversational accounts of life in the Eastern literary landscape--New York City, New England, Long Island. In urbane free verse, the poet recalls and meditates on music and painting, homosexuality, weekends with friends--John Ashbery and Fairfield Porter among them--deaths, a drive to the Hamptons. Unlike many later writers who have tried to convey the poetry inherent in the mundane aspects of their quotidian routine, Schuyler had a superb ear for language, for "How the thing said / Is in the words, how / The words are themselves / The thing said." His work is almost always interesting and witty, though rarely profound. A typical poem finds him dining out with friends, the narrative following the course of the poet's meandering thoughts: "Now it's tomorrow, / as usual. Turned out that / Doug Douglas Crase, the poet / had to work (he makes his bread / writing speeches): thirty pages / explaining why Eastman Kodak's / semi-slump(?) is just what / the stockholders ordered." Rarely has a poet imparted so much of his experience as honestly and engagingly as Schuyler does here.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 429 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T); 1st edition (July 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374126186
• ISBN-13: 978-0374126186
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,306,283 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Still shamefully neglected, March 29, 2000

By 

John Cassels - See all my reviews

This review is from: Collected Poems (Paperback)

I'm shocked that no one else has posted a review of this book. If you care at all about poetry in the latter half of the century just ended you cannot ignore Schuyler, and here is his poetry -- he was also a fine novelist -- *complete,* and at a bargain price. Schuyler is often compared to his "New York School" compatriot Frank O'Hara -- in that both could be called poets of the present moment, of immediacy -- and to Elizabeth Bishop -- with whom he shares an eye for detail -- but he is far more unflinching in his subjective confrontation with the objective world than either of these analogues: less anxious than O'Hara to be ever off into the next sensation, he is also less willing than is Bishop to elaborate, embroider, or buff the object as seen. Schuyler not only records the looks of weathers, fields, rooms, gardens, friends, he renders (often with shattering poignancy) the seismic bounce of one's response to the things and persons of this world. His is a poetry of unprecedentedly unswerving honesty, as brave as that of any confessional but without the cloying sense that the poet is doing anything unusual or exemplary, and without the sense that anything said or done will be forgiven. Schuyler is deservedly well-known for his long poems -- "The Crystal Lithium," "Hymn to Life," "The Morning of the Poem," "A Few Days" -- but he is equally to be treasured for sequences like "The Payne Whitney Poems," an account of mental incarceration that is terrifyingly offhand and funny, and for the many smaller, gemlike poems whose production was, for Schuyler, apparently as inevitable as breathing, while that lasted. Anyone who loves poetry should know these poems; there will be no others like them.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wreckage and Romanticism, April 28, 2000

By 

David Dodd Lee (Midwest) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Collected Poems (Paperback)

These sparkling poems mimic in their movements the springtime light that's always raining down around this poet, despite whatever woes he might have had. Read the long "Morning of the Poem" and tell me it isn't one of the most moving poems in the history of poetry.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great poet, December 25, 2000

By 

John H. Flannigan (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Collected Poems (Paperback)

This collection should establish Schuyler as one of the great poets of his generation. I particularly admire his tautness--precise names and descriptions, inventive phrases--as well as his flexibility--a wide-ranging eye and ear and a free-flowing memory. Throughout these poems there lurks a clear intention to inform, to connect, to synthesize. I look forward to returning to this book many times for refreshment and illumination.