Customer Reviews

Last and Lost Poems (New Directions Paperbook)

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The remarkable thing is that Schwartz kept writing great poetry, despite alcohol and a solitary life. The poems may not have the same subject or form as those in "Summer Knowledge", being more free and more sentimental (more like Whitman), but he was still producing good poems. For example in the 1965 poem Spring: "The earth, just like a schoolgirl, memorizes Poems, so many poems..." Schwartz was still interested in the Kingdom of poetry, for example: " Unless ye be as a little child ye cannot enter the kingdom of poetry". The Studies of Narcissus provide an innovative twist on the familiar story, that looking into a stream provided a changing image on oneself. Knowing about the years of drug and alcohol abuse, these lines from the 1958 poem seemed particularly poignant:
"afraid of every little death,
... or sickened by the terror of new hope,
or certain, again, that every death of any hope
Concludes all hope and makes the body's death
More desirable than the recurrent torment of the years."