Delmore Schwartz, hailed as "the American Auden" even before the publication of his first collection of poetry in 1938, is now more often remembered as the inspiration for poems by John Berryman and Robert Lowell, and as the source for Saul Bellow's protagonist in Humboldt's Gift (1975). His own poetry is sporadic and often derivative in achievement.

Schwartz defined himself as a poet throughout a career as short-story writer, dramatist, critic, influential journalist, and teacher. For Berryman, he was "the most underrated poet of the twentieth century." Schwartz's early years and family background are the subject of his best writing; his disastrous final years are the basis of a literary mythology which colors many accounts of his place in mid-twentieth-century American literature.

The first-born son of Rumanian-Jewish immigrants Harry and Rose Nathanson Schwartz, Delmore David Schwartz proclaimed himself "the poet of the Atlantic migration, that made America": this event, and...