At first glance, the two most interesting American poet-critics of mid-century don’t appear to have much in common. Delmore Schwartz, the New York Jewish intellectual, was turbulent, mad, brilliant, a destroyer of hotel rooms and imaginer of conspiracies. In his early poems he crossed Eliotic intellectuality with Yeatsian music and came up with a unique hybrid—an exuberant, fatalistic, teleologically compelling type of modernist poem that could be “about” anything from Orpheus to Caesar to the Romanovs’ bounding ball; in his later years he dropped Eliot, found Whitman, and produced a series of bizarre, energetic, mesmeric post-Walt effusions about Seurat and Psyche and Marilyn Monroe. Randall Jarrell—to a casual observer—was quite a different sort. Serene, seemingly stable, far more comfortable in a sleepy Southern town than in a crude, dirty Northern city (“What a way to speak!” was his comment on New York accents), he was the author in his early years of quietly forceful poems about girls in libraries and dead soldiers; his later poems are pensive, wistful, sadhearted meditations about aging women and paper boys.

They would, then, seem to be worlds apart. Yet the closer one looks at their lives and work, the more convinced one is that Schwartz and Jarrell were, in the ways that matter, two of a kind. Though known for their wit, humor, and capacity for enthusiasm, both were nonetheless profoundly terrified by life. “O Life is terror-full beyond belief,” writes Schwartz. “How difficult it is to know and live.” And Jarrell