Quote
"I knew that Humbolt would die soon, because I had seen him on the street two months before. And he had death all over him. He didn't see me. He was gray stout sick dusty, he had brought a pretzel stick and was eating it. His lunch."
James Atlas (Biographer): Delmore Schwartz was born in 1913 in New York, and was appraised by T.S Elliot as the poet of his generation. This amazing, sudden, precocious recognition. But Delmore also became a symbol of the artist in America who's doomed by the pressures of capitalism and has to be crazy because he's a poet.
Saul Bellow: People like that have no proper place in American life. They just don't. This is a high tech, high finance, rationally organized kind of society in which people normally don't have such motives as Humbolt had. They just don't. He himself looks upon himself as an alien object, because he was aware that he does not guide his life by the standards that prevail. But in his saner moments, I would have thought that he would say that art was something that life couldn't do without. Uh, there was not this sort of divorce at at all. But that um, um, art was one of the powers that made life life. I think we all believe that. I think I still do.
— Saul Bellow
Share
Sign In to comment on this quote
