In the following essay, New examines Schwartz's fiction in the larger context of American and Jewish-American literature.

Saposnik is an American educator and critic who specializes in Jewish-American literature. In the following essay, he discusses Schwartz's treatment of Jewish-American identity in his fiction and poetry.

Shechner is an American educator and critic who specializes in Jewish-American literature. In the following essay, he reviews Portrait of Delmore: Journals and Notes of Delmore Schwartz: 1939–1959.

In the following essay, Ford offers an overview of Schwartz's literary career, focusing on his achievements and limitations as an artist.

Even joyous passages, as in "The Kingdom of Poetry," are deeply tinged by fatalism. It is as if, true diagnostician that he was, [Delmore] was constantly remembering his depression in the midst of his mania, and vice versa. This melancholy is deeply rooted in Delmore's view of history and the growth of self. For him, man is constantly shaped by unconscious or dimly perceived forces—as the melancholy commentators of Genesis and Coriolanus point out. Delmore never fixed on the prec...

[Delmore Schwartz] was an exceptionally able literary critic. Far too sophisticated intellectually and too much at home with conceptual matters to turn himself into an exponent of any given exclusive "method," he also understood the pitfalls to which critical discourse is exposed when it oversteps its limits to indulge in philosophical or sociological divagations. Sound in his literary judgments, he wrote without pretension or solemnity and without ever divesting himself of his fine and highly...

Schwartz's fictional aims are suggested in his criticism of other fiction writers. This fictional "credo" is clearest in "John Dos Passos and the Whole Truth," a review of U.S.A. which goes beyond its topical subject to make a general statement about the nature of fiction…. This "whole truth" and "imagination" necessary for great literature enter fiction through a "multiscient individual," "the individual of the fulle...

In the following review, Halio favorably assesses The World Is a Wedding.

The slyly clever stories that Schwartz wrote, as well as his rueful, contemplative poems, can leave some readers cold. These stories and poems are associated with the span of influence enjoyed by "the New York intellectuals" from 1937 to, say, 1960, an influence deriving from a special blend of opinion and sensibility: anti-Stalinist left, aggressively modernist, brashly high-brow, freeswinging cosmopolitan, uneasily Jewish. All in all, this adds up to a pretty stiff dose for certain kinds of ...

If the task of reading Delmore Schwartz's poetry seems more difficult than it should be, it may be that one finds it difficult to reconcile the reputation of the poet … with the poems themselves. I make this general and possibly incorrect remark to suggest that [the] recently published selection of Schwartz's poems What Is to Be Given might better serve to revive interest in Schwartz's work if Douglas Dunn's thorough Introduction had been placed as an Afterword. Schwartz&#...