Abstract

Ourself When Young

The article focuses on the book "Genesis," by the author Delmore Schwartz. The time is this century, the place New York, the antagonist third-generation American of Russian-Jewish extraction. The readers are introduced to him some time after he has fought his way through a New York childhood, memories of which are keeping him from sleep. Ancestral memories, too, going back to the generation which left Russia in dislike of military conscription. This assertion of individuality, generalized, becomes one of the main themes of the poem. As the youth recalls episode after episode in his and his parents' lives, they are interpreted both by his own growing intelligence and by a chorus of listening and commenting ghosts. The ghosts' dialogues with the hero, in blank verse, alternate with the episodes of family life, narrated in prose. "Genesis," the first book of a longer work, ends, in about the hero's seventh year.