James Schuyler (1923–1991) was a leading figure of the New York School, a wide-ranging cross-section of artists whose experiments in form, tone, and the collaborative exchange of technique and sensibility across genres and mediums embodied a new aesthetic approach to the inclusion of the everyday and ephemeral. Together with John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, and Barbara Guest, Schuyler is one of the prominent “first generation” poets of the New York School whose careers began in the early 1950s. Schuyler’s work—full of a discursive attention to the world and the movement of daily time—is indispensable. As poet James Meetze writes, “James Schuyler remains a central and inimitable figure in twentieth-century poetry. Delicate, careful, witty, and crass—often even in the same line—his poems offer astute observation capable of transporting us instantly through time and space. His is, as he puts it in his poem ‘Grousset’s China (or Slogans)’ a precision of multiplicity.’”
Born in Chicago, Schuyler grew up in East Aurora, New York, and Washington, D.C., among other places, and briefly attended Bethany College in West Virginia. After serving in the Navy during World War II, Schuyler went on to live in Ischia, Italy, with W. H. Auden as the elder poet’s typist. In an interview later in life, Schuyler described the experience as a discouraging one in regards to his own aspirations; he recalled: “Well, if this is poetry, I’m certainly not going to write any myself.” Despite his doubts, Auden’s intricate, playful formalism would be an important precedent for the sharp incandescence of Schuyler’s lyricism. Meanwhile, his future cohorts Ashbery, Koch, and O’Hara were becoming friends at Harvard.
Schuyler’s prominent influences include Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, various threads of the French avant-gardes, the prose of early 20th century novelists such as Ronald Firbank, and Whitman—updated to mid-century American life as a gay man. It is important to note that Schuyler’s poetry echoes elements of Ashbery and O’Hara’s poetry—a close attention to everyday experience and ordinary objects, a chatty and colloquial voice—as much as it sometimes resonates with the work of Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore. However, Schuyler’s poetry eludes direct aesthetic comparisons to peers and predecessors. Schuyler’s droll wit, devotion to flora and fauna in his poems, and experiments with form and musicality—particularly his distinctive collage techniques and use of very short and very long lines—are a few defining characteristics of his work. As Andrew Epstein notes, “Schuyler continually finds himself crashing into the limitations of language and the impossibility of representational fidelity.” Though his poems often collect the ephemera of everyday experience, unlike the confessional poetry in vogue during his lifetime, Schuyler’s linguistic playfulness and interest in musicality set his work apart from the mainstream.
It was in New York City in the early 1950s that Schuyler’s aesthetic would begin to crystalize around friendships with writers and artists associated with the New York School, especially Ashbery and O’Hara, the latter of whom he shared an apartment with at 326 East 49th Street. At various times in the 1950s through the 1960s, Schuyler worked as a curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s Circulating Exhibitions Department, wrote critically for ARTnews—including a cover story on Joe Brainard—and cofounded and edited the influential magazine Locus Solus with Ashbery, Koch, and Harry Mathews. Schuyler’s social-aesthetic circle would grow to include friendships and romantic relationships with poet and dance critic Edwin Denby, pianist Arthur Gold, and painters Jane Freilicher and Fairfield Porter. His friendships with painters like Freilicher and Porter particularly influenced his poetry. Like Freilicher and Porter’s understated scenes of daily movement and change, Schuyler’s poems embody fluctuations of perception that mix warmth and humor with a persistent anxiety. Porter was an especially important presence in Schuyler’s life in the 1960s when, after a series of mental breakdowns, Schuyler lived with the painter and his family in Southampton and at their summer home in Great Spruce Head Island, Maine. Schuyler’s issues with mental health continued throughout his life, and he was periodically hospitalized. From 1979 to the end of his life, Schuyler lived in the infamous Chelsea Hotel in New York with the help of a series of young poet assistants,
including Eileen Myles, Helena Hughes, Tom Carey, and Elinor Nauen.
Though revered among his peers, Schuyler’s work did not find a wide audience as readily as other New York School poets, due at least partly to the belated—as compared to other members of the New York School—publication of his early work. A small collection of Schuyler’s poems, Salute, was published by Tiber Press in 1960 with illustrations by Grace Hartigan. That same year, he saw his poems included in the influential The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 anthology, edited by Donald Allen. His first full-length poetry collection, Freely Espousing, was published in 1969 when he was 46 years old. Schuyler’s subsequent work would be published regularly throughout the rest of his life. Although known primarily for his poetry, Schuyler also wrote three novels: Alfred and Guinevere (1958), his first published book; A Nest of Ninnies (1969), a collaboration with Ashbery; and What’s For Dinner? (1978). Schuyler’s The Morning of the Poem (1980) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1981.
Schuyler is a germinal presence within post-WWII American poetics, and many so-called “second generation” New York School poets, such as Myles, Alice Notley, and Ted Berrigan, were deeply influenced by him. In their novel Chelsea Girls, Myles memorializes Schuyler’s influential presence in terms that echo his poetry’s thematic devotions: “He was like music, Jimmy was, and you had to be like music too to be with him, but understand in his room he was conductor. He directed the yellow air in room 625. It was marvelous to be around.”
In the last years of his life, and for the first time in his career, Schuyler gave a series of public readings of his poetry in New York City, including the now-legendary reading at the Dia Art Foundation in 1988. The publication of Collected Poems in 1993 and Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems, edited by James Meetze and Simon Pettet, in 2010, as well as volumes of Schuyler’s selected art writings and letters, have continued to generate interest in Schuyler’s influential legacies as a poet whose portraits of sexuality, aesthetic perception, and the ephemera of everyday life mark an oeuvre of remarkable formal innovation.
—Nick Sturm
Nick Sturm is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming with The Poetry Foundation, The Brooklyn Rail, PEN, ASAP/J, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. His scholarly and archival work can be found at his blog Crystal Set.
Jessica Fletcher, a Poets House Special Collections Research and Writing Fellow, contributed to the conception of this project, as part of a joint program with the CUNY Graduate Center.