Books, Arts & Manners: Manic Power

The Middle Generation: The Lives and Poetry of Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell, by Bruce Bawer (Archon, 216 pp., $25)

Bawer’s uneven first book, a literary study based on a dissertation and apparently completed in 1983, is less lively and sophisticated than his recent reviews in The New Criterion. He has noted the biographical similarities in a group of talented American poets who began to publish during World War II and “were erratic, driven to pathological excesses in behavior by an assortment of secret agonies. Profound pain filled much of their lives and informed much of their work.”

About the Author

Jeffrey Meyers

Mr. Meyers is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of John Huston: Courage and Art.

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The Middle Generation: The Lives and Poetry of Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell, by Bruce Bawer (Archon, 216 pp., $25)

Bawer’s uneven first book, a literary study based on a dissertation and apparently completed in 1983, is less lively and sophisticated than his recent reviews in The New Criterion. He has noted the biographical similarities in a group of talented American poets who began to publish during World War II and “were erratic, driven to pathological excesses in behavior by an assortment of secret agonies. Profound pain filled much of their lives and informed much of their work.”