On the last day of February in 1954, James Schuyler looked out his window and wrote a poem. He was living with his friend Frank O’Hara, and from their tenement apartment on East 49th Street they had a view of the United Nations headquarters, constructed only a few years earlier. In his poem “February,” Schuyler alluded to the UN building in passing, but his gaze gravitated to more mundane details: “A chimney, breathing a little smoke”; “the boxy trucks roll[ing] up Second Avenue / into the sky”; “a woman who just came to her window / and stands there filling it / jogging her baby in her arms.” “I can’t get over / how it all works in together,” Schuyler marveled, astonished by the casual, random splendor of this scene. The last line of the poem, now also the title of Nathan Kernan’s engrossing new biography of Schuyler, was at once matter-of-fact and awestruck: “It’s a day like any other.”

“Merely to say, to see and say, things / 
as they are”: This was how Schuyler defined his aspiration as a poet. It sounds humble, but for Schuyler this commitment to empiricism entailed a whole philosophy of form. Schuyler was close with the painter Fairfield Porter, who shared his unflagging devotion to the quotidian. “The truest order is what you find already there, or that will be given if you don’t try for it,” Porter once wrote. “When you arrange, you fail.” Schuyler’s subjects, like Porter’s, were unspectacular—nature, the weather, the quiddities and comforts of domestic life—and his poems, like Porter’s paintings, elegant yet effortless. They home in on things like the way “level light plunges / among the layering boughs of a balsam fir / and enflames its trunk,” or how “air…billows like bedsheets / on a clothesline and the clouds / hang in a traffic jam.” Reading Schuyler, you get the sense of an attentive mind occupying an atmosphere of rare serenity. Little seems to disturb these cozy idylls; the closest we get to dramatic incident is when the poet chases a hornet out of his room or gets up to fix himself more toast.

Yet Schuyler, whose poems exuded such calm, lived an unusually troubled and tumultuous life. Prone to anxiety attacks, nervous breakdowns, morbid depressions, and manic episodes, he was in and out of psychiatric hospitals for decades. His recurrent mental illness—never definitely diagnosed—took an enormous toll on his friendships, his romantic relationships, his finances, and his literary career. Even so, he managed to produce three novels and numerous books of poetry, one of which, The Morning of the Poem, won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1981.

Kernan knew Schuyler personally toward the end of his life and has been researching this biography, off and on, for more than 30 years. Drawing from dozens of original interviews alongside reams of unpublished archival material, Kernan provides a wealth of detail about a figure who, while hardly unknown, has long retained an air of mystery. This is partly because Schuyler, his friends, and many of his critics have been understandably reticent about emphasizing his mental illness and the havoc it wrought on his own life and the lives around him, lest it overshadow or distract from the subtle power of his art. Unlike Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and other contemporaries with similar experiences of mental disorder, Schuyler rarely used his ordeals as literary material: He was a poet of the sitting room, not the sanatorium. “From trauma and mess and ‘breakdown,’” Kernan writes, Schuyler “looked away.” Many who loved him and his work have been inclined to do the same. And yet trauma, mess, and breakdown were, in large part, the story of his life.

James Schuyler was born in Chicago in 1923. His parents had divorced by the time he was 6, and he spent his adolescence in upstate New York, where he was raised by his mother and a despised, possibly abusive, stepfather. Schuyler was a shy and bookish child. He realized he was gay from an early age, but unsurprisingly for a suburban teenager in the 1940s, he remained in the closet. Under “Ambition” in a questionnaire for his high school yearbook, he wrote: “To go steady with two girls at once.” (His mother’s reaction, when he eventually came out to her, tellingly conflated his homosexuality with his literary interests: “Just because you like Oscar Wilde, it doesn’t mean you have to do all those things.”)

Schuyler registered for the draft in 1942, shortly before flunking out of Bethany College in West Virginia, and served as a sonar operator on board a naval destroyer, the USS Glennon. At the end of 1943, he went AWOL under somewhat mysterious circumstances: From what Kernan has been able to piece together, he accidentally missed curfew after a night of drinking and then floated around Manhattan, paralyzed by anxiety, for nearly a month. After he finally turned himself in, Schuyler was briefly incarcerated in a military prison on Hart Island before being given an undesirable discharge—not for his desertion per se but for his homosexuality, which he confessed during the obligatory psychiatric examinations that ensued. This ordeal exacerbated Schuyler’s natural tendency toward nervousness, which now manifested for the first time in involuntary tremors that would recur throughout his life in times of stress.

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Soon after leaving the Navy, Schuyler returned to New York and, via the city’s blossoming gay scene, found his way into the social circle around the poet W.H. Auden. Schuyler was a close friend of Chester Kallman, Auden’s life partner—Auden nicknamed them “Dorabella and Fiordiligi,” after the capricious sisters in Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte—and was apparently the model for the character Emble, a shell-shocked former sailor, in Auden’s 1947 book-length poem The Age of Anxiety. Auden served as a kind of mentor to Schuyler, though as a young man Schuyler aspired to be a fiction writer rather than a poet: When Auden hired him to type up drafts of some of his works in progress, Schuyler remembered thinking, “Well, if this is poetry I’m never going to write any myself.”

Schuyler changed his mind about that in the early 1950s, after meeting a few new friends who would form the core of what we now call the New York School of poets: Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Barbara Guest. Schuyler would later reminisce about his first impressions of O’Hara, whom he met in 1951 at a party for the painter Larry Rivers: “His conversation was self-propelling and one idea, or anecdote, or bon mot was fuel to his own fire, inspiring him verbally to blaze ahead, that curious voice rising and falling, full of invisible italics.” Before long he moved in with O’Hara, who invited Schuyler to live with him after his former roommate, Hal Fondren, left at the end of the summer of 1952. Schuyler, in return, helped O’Hara assemble the manuscript for his first major book of poems, 1957’s Meditations in an Emergency.

Falling in with the New York School (Schuyler, like most of the writers to whom it’s been applied, never really cared for the term) marked a turning point in his life, the first time he felt “accepted by people of whose work I was absolutely certain.” He grew especially close to Ashbery, who said of Schuyler that “asking advice from him is only a step away from consulting oneself”; together they cowrote 1969’s A Nest of Ninnies, a wry comic novel written in alternating sentences. The New York School poets also palled around with painters like Rivers, Jane Freilicher, Grace Hartigan, and Nell Blaine, with whom they collaborated and by whom they were excited and inspired. “New York poets, except I suppose the color-­blind,” as Schuyler summed it up, “are affected most by the floods of paint in whose crashing surf we all scramble.”

In 1951, Schuyler began his career as a poet. He wrote his first published poem, “Salute,” shortly after meeting O’Hara and Ashbery. It’s a meditation on ambition and lost time, melancholy yet somehow hopeful: “Past is past, and if one / remembers what one meant / to do and never did, is / not to have thought to do / enough?”

Schuyler wrote the poem in a Westchester County mental hospital, following a frightening episode in which he came to believe that he was Jesus Christ and that the Apocalypse was near at hand. (He also claimed to have been visited by the Virgin Mary, and that she had delivered a box of Du Maurier cigarettes to him.) Concerned friends arranged for him to be admitted to Bellevue Hospital and then transferred to Payne Whitney Westchester, where he remained for nine weeks; the hospital bills were paid by Auden.

This would prove to be the first of many institutionalizations for Schuyler. He had another breakdown in 1961, after accidentally setting fire to his apartment by falling asleep with a lit cigarette, which landed him in Grace New Haven Hospital for three months; this time, the poet James Merrill footed the bill. An even more severe break occurred in the summer of 1971, when he once again claimed to be Jesus Christ and threatened the young son of the poet Ron Padgett. A terrified Padgett called the police: When they arrived, Schuyler greeted them at the door completely naked and covered in rose petals.

Schuyler’s instability made him intensely dependent on his friends, who provided him with emotional and financial support throughout his life. He “had a real talent for being taken care of, and finding people to take care of him,” as the curator Kynaston McShine, who worked with Schuyler at the Museum of Modern Art, put it, and he was particularly good at insinuating himself into families, in part because he loved children and had a knack for entertaining and empathizing with them. (His charming first novel, 1958’s Alfred and Guinevere, about a pair of precocious young siblings spending the summer with their grandmother, exemplifies this affinity.) As Kernan notes, Schuyler “idealized family life” and constantly sought out “stable surrogate families to attach himself to in one way or another”—a response, it seems, to the insecurity of his own upbringing.

The most durable of these attachments was to the family of Fairfield Porter, with whom he lived between 1961 and 1973. “Jimmy came for the weekend and stayed for eleven years,” Porter’s wife Anne once quipped, and his status in their Southampton home hovered ambiguously between long-term houseguest and permanent family member. Frank O’Hara joked that the Porters had “adopted” Schuyler.

An additional layer of complexity arose from the fact that Fairfield Porter, who was bisexual, had fallen in love with Schuyler. Initially, Schuyler refused his advances, but sometime in the early ’60s, their platonic friendship deepened into an affair. The true extent of their relationship was a secret for years, but even those not privy to it could see there was an unusual degree of intimacy between the two. In the evenings, they read Dostoyevsky and Keats aloud to each other; in the mornings, Porter would go into Schuyler’s bedroom to kiss him awake. It was only at the behest of Katie, who in her 20s decided that Schuyler’s continuing presence in their home was inappropriate, that her father finally asked him to leave, in the fall of 1970. Schuyler replied, “I’ll think about it”—and then remained for three 
more years.

As a poet, Schuyler was a late bloomer. Though his work appeared intermittently throughout the 1950s and ’60s, he didn’t publish a collection—the instant classic Freely Espousing—until 1969, by which point he was 45, and most of his peers’ careers were already well underway. Despite this slow start and his ongoing personal travails, Schuyler managed to build up an impressive momentum in the 1970s, publishing a series of volumes to increasing critical acclaim. In particular, he became a master of the long poem, beginning with 1972’s “The Crystal Lithium” and continuing with “Hymn to Life,” “The Morning of the Poem,” and “A Few Days,” all of them among his finest achievements. These loose, diaristic poems, written in stretched-out, Whitman-like lines, combine the sumptuous detail of Schuyler’s lyrics with a more expansive philosophical and autobiographical scope, touching on themes of mortality, sexuality, and the passage of time. “The days slide by and we feel we must / Stamp an impression on them,” Schuyler writes in “Hymn to Life.” “It is quite other. They stamp us.”

Yet even as he grew in stature as a poet—culminating in his 1981 Pulitzer, awarded to him by a three-person jury that included his old friend John Ashbery—Schuyler’s day-to-day existence remained a struggle. Because of the chaos that engulfed so much of his life, much of A Day Like Any Other makes for harrowing reading. The late ’70s and early ’80s—during which time Schuyler was living in squalor, abusing drugs and alcohol, and experiencing frequent manic episodes—were a particularly depressing stretch. He was in and out of psychiatric hospitals often, racking up bills that he relied on friends (including the Porters) to settle. In 1977, he once again managed to set fire to his apartment by smoking in bed; this time, he ended up in intensive care for almost a month. He developed an obsessive crush on his personal assistant, a poet named Tom Carey, who strung him along while hitting him up for money and pilfering his personal manuscripts, including letters from O’Hara, to sell for drugs. Schuyler’s physical health also deteriorated during this period: He gained an exorbitant amount of weight, contracted diabetes, and in August 1984 had to have two of his toes amputated.

“Poor Jimmy,” Ashbery wrote in a letter to a mutual friend in 1977, while Schuyler was recovering from the fire. “During his breakdown…he told me that life had been after him with a sledgehammer, and if it wasn’t a self-­fulfilling prophecy then it certainly is now.” But before he died, of a combined stroke and heart attack, in 1991, Schuyler seemed to have outrun the sledgehammer: The last few years of his life were relatively happy and orderly. After one final hospitalization in the summer of 1985, he stopped drinking and finally found a psychiatric medication regime that appeared to work for him. He began to reclaim many of the daily tasks—buying clothes, cooking, cleaning, managing his finances—that had long been delegated to friends or assistants. He even gave his first public poetry reading in 1988, at the age of 65. These were treated as historic occasions by denizens of the New York art and poetry worlds, who by this point considered Schuyler a living legend. He took justifiable pride in the attention he earned for these events, bragging to a friend after reading to a packed house at the Dia Art Foundation in Soho, “I was a fucking sensation.”

Schuyler didn’t take these victories for granted; he’d had too many defeats for that. “When I think that…I, Jim the Jerk, am / still alive and breathing / deeply,” he wrote in 1975’s “Trip,” one of his few poems to reflect on his history of breakdowns and hospitalizations, “that I think / is a miracle.” The miracle, in fact, was his poetry, which is one of the permanent joys of American literature, carved out of a life that had more than its portion of misery. Kernan’s invaluable book gives us a fuller sense of just how unlikely that miracle was.