Delmore Schwartz

Yeah.

So he went to Syracuse University and studied for a while under Delmore Schwartz.

How did that have an impact on his work? You know, obviously it must have.

I think that had an impact on his work, but it took a while to surface.

He was a huge fan of literature, what we might call beat literature now, alongside of his passion for rock music, but they didn't merge, it seems, until 1965 significantly in his songwriting.

But I think that studying with Delmore Schwartz gave Lou Reed a sense of integrity that maybe at first Reed was thinking, I can only apply this to my written prose because that's the form in which writers like Delmore Schwartz are making their art and gaining recognition.

Rock and roll, that's great, but maybe that's more frivolous.

That's more just fun lyrics to fill in sound.

James Merrill, Merwin, Howard Nemiroff, Michael Palmer, and Muriel Rukeyser are all born in New York City.

And Delmore Schwartz is in Brooklyn.

And Richard Wilbur is New York City.

That is an awful lot of poets in New York City.

So they dedicated this song to him because it had the least words on the album.

By the time they were recording this, Delmore Schwartz had become a recluse, was living at New York's Chelsea Hotel, and Reid tried to go and visit him, but Schwartz refused to see him.

And by the time the album was released, Schwarz had died.

But Lou Reed clearly felt, not necessarily expressed in this song, but Lou Reed clearly felt a lot of affection for this guy, Schwarz.