Introduction

Abstract

In the posthumously published poem “America, America!,” Delmore Schwartz announces himself to be “a poet of the Hudson River and the heights above it, / the lights, the stars, the bridges.”¹ In so doing, he is claiming, metonymically, to be a poet of the American Dream—of New York and its literal skyscrapers, but also of the heights of ambition that they represent; of actual city lights, but also of hope and mental lucidity; of Broadway celebrities, shining as brightly as stars in the sky; and of bridges, both concrete, joining separate districts, and metaphorical, uniting peoples separated from each other by culture and race. But Schwartz then reformulates this assertion, escalating his claims: “I am also by self-appointment the laureate of the Atlantic /—of the peoples’ hearts, crossing it / to new America” (LL, 4). Moving from “a” to “the” (from one among many to the only one), from “poet” to “laureate,” and from the Hudson River to the unimaginably vaster Atlantic Ocean, he performs a rhetorical maneuver that seems to grant him totemic authority. His self-promotion aligns him with the foremost New York poet, Walt Whitman, who had described the United States as a “teeming nation of nations.”² Schwartz’s emphasis upon the Atlantic itself, however, the protean expanse between two continents, rather than upon the solid land of the United States or any European nation, belies a sense of indeterminacy.