A short life of the author
James Schuyler (9 November 1923 – 12 April 1991) was an American poet, novelist, and art critic who was the quietest and most purely lyrical member of the New York School of poets — the group that included John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Kenneth Koch. Where O’Hara was urban and social and Ashbery was cerebral and syntactically complex, Schuyler was the poet of attention itself: his work records the play of light on water, the progression of seasons, the colour of a particular afternoon with a patience and precision that have no real parallel in American poetry. He won the Pulitzer Prize for The Morning of the Poem (1980), and his reputation has grown steadily since his death, with many readers and poets now regarding him as the finest of the four original New York School poets.
Life and Career
Schuyler was born in Chicago and raised in Washington, D.C., and East Aurora, New York. He attended Bethany College in West Virginia but did not graduate. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he lived in Italy, where he worked as W.H. Auden’s secretary in Ischia — an experience that deepened his immersion in poetry but was, by his own account, difficult. He moved to New York in the early 1950s and became part of the circle of poets and painters that constituted the New York School.
Unlike O’Hara and Ashbery, who were prodigiously productive from an early age, Schuyler published slowly. His first collection, Freely Espousing, did not appear until 1969, when he was forty-five. The Crystal Lithium (1972) and Hymn to Life (1974) established his mature voice: long, meditative poems that track the movement of consciousness through a landscape — usually the view from a window at Fairfield Porter’s house in Southampton, Long Island, or at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan — with an attentiveness that transforms the ordinary into the luminous.
The Morning of the Poem (1980), which won the Pulitzer Prize, contains the long title poem — a discursive, autobiographical meditation that moves freely between memory, observation, desire, and reflection. A Few Days (1985) includes the extraordinary long poem of the same name, which many readers consider his masterpiece: a journal-like poem written during a stay at a friend’s house that is simultaneously about grief, recovery, the beauty of the visible world, and the difficulty of being alive.
Schuyler struggled throughout his life with mental illness — bipolar disorder that led to repeated hospitalisations. For much of the 1960s and 1970s he lived with the painter Fairfield Porter and Porter’s family in Southampton, a domestic arrangement that gave him stability and the landscape that became the setting for his greatest poems. After Porter’s death in 1975, Schuyler lived at the Chelsea Hotel and was cared for by a circle of devoted friends, including the poet and editor Tom Carey.
He also wrote two novels — Alfred and Guinevere (1958) and What’s for Dinner? (1978) — and collaborated with Ashbery on a third, A Nest of Ninnies (1969). His art criticism, written for Art News and other publications, is characteristically perceptive.
Themes and Style
Schuyler’s poetry is about seeing. His fundamental subject is the visible world — weather, plants, light, water, sky — rendered with a painter’s eye for colour and composition. But his poems are never merely descriptive: they are records of consciousness, tracking the mind’s movement from observation to memory to feeling to reflection and back, with a naturalness that disguises considerable formal sophistication.
His line is flexible and unpredictable, ranging from short, clipped phrases to long, sinuous sentences that unspool across the page. His diction is plain but exact — he never uses a fancy word when a common one will serve, but the common words are placed with extraordinary care. His emotional register ranges from exuberant joy to deep grief, often within a single poem.
Critical Standing
Schuyler is a poet’s poet who has increasingly become a reader’s poet. His Pulitzer Prize notwithstanding, he was long overshadowed by O’Hara and Ashbery, but the publication of his Collected Poems (1993) and his Diary (1997) revealed the depth and consistency of his achievement. Poets as diverse as Eileen Myles, Mark Doty, and August Kleinzahler have cited him as a central influence.
Key Works
- Freely Espousing (1969)
- The Crystal Lithium (1972)
- The Morning of the Poem (1980)
- A Few Days (1985)
- Collected Poems (1993)
Collecting Schuyler
Schuyler’s books were published in small editions and are increasingly scarce. Alfred and Guinevere (1958, Harcourt Brace) brings $50–$150. Freely Espousing (1969, Doubleday Paris Review Editions) — his poetry debut — brings $100–$300. The Morning of the Poem (1980, Farrar Straus) brings $40–$100. The Collected Poems (1993, Farrar Straus) and Diary (1997) are essential for collectors.