Eve Ottenberg, writing in the Village Voice, observed that "it is the surface of life that Schuyler is after: the deliberate, yammering silliness of these characters persists through the tragedies of their lives, and in the end it makes them more than ninnies and even helps them endure."

Sponsor Message.

Schuyler's Poetry

Although he had published a few poems in limited-edition chapbooks and literary magazines, Schuyler did not publish his first major collection of poetry, Freely Espousing, until 1969 when he was 46 years old.

Freely Espousing introduced readers to a fully developed poet who had been writing for almost twenty years. John Koethe, reviewing the collection in Poetry, remarked that "coming upon a mature body of work without much prior warning is always a perplexing experience." He further observed that "not only is Freely Espousing a collection of extremely good poems, but it also embodies the sort of vision that periodically awakens us to the infinite range of possibilities open to the poet."

Included in the collection is the poem "Buried at Springs," Schuyler's elegy for his friend Frank O'Hara who had been killed in a dune buggy accident on Fire Island in 1966. Schuyler's emotional reaction to the tragedy is filtered through a meditation on nature and the mutability of life.

As Schuyler recalled in a 1992 interview, "[The elegy] was written in Maine. The things described in it are what I was seeing out the window in the house in Maine. You know, Frank died in the summer . . . and it was shattering."

Schuyler published his next collection of poetry, Crystal Lithium, in 1972. His focus in these poems is on the minutiae of daily life, such as the smell of coffee on an early winter morning, which reveal, according to the Virginia Quarterly Review, his "meticulous . . . devotion to the physical world." In the New York Times Book Review, David Kalstone contended that "these are the best poems that [Schuyler] has ever written."

Schuyler published several more volumes of poetry throughout the 1970s, including A Sun Cab (1972); Hymn to Life (1974); Song (1976); The Fireproof Floors of Witley Court: English Songs and Dances (1976); and The Home Book: Prose and Poetry, 1951-1970 (1977).

In 1980, he published The Morning of the Poem, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1981. Joseph Conte, in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, observes that the collection's sixty-page title work is a "poem of recovery--of the self, of one's family and friends, of a meaningful existence." He contends that it is Schuyler's "masterwork" and "among the best long poems of the postmodern era."

Schuyler published his last completed volume of poetry, A Few Days, in 1985. The long title poem, which Conte calls a "significant contribution to the autobiographical epic," is Schuyler's elegy for his mother.

Posthumous Publications

Schuyler died in New York City of a stroke on April 12, 1991.

Schuyler's Collected Poems were published in 1993. As a reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted, "Rarely has a poet imparted so much of his experience as honestly and engagingly as Schuyler does here."

The Diary of James Schuyler, which he began writing in the late 1960s, was published in 1997, edited by Nathan Kernan. In 2004, Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler, was published, followed a year later by James Schuyler's Letters to Frank O'Hara, both edited by William Corbett. Together, these publications, which include meditations on music, literature, painting, and nature, as well as witty, gossipy portraits of the gay and literary scenes in New York, provide great insight into Schuyler's life and works.

Schuyler's manuscripts, covering the years 1947 to 1991, are housed at the Mandeville Department of Special Collections at the University of California, San Diego.

Although largely invisible to the general public, a large body of twentieth-century gay male literature by American authors was published prior to Stonewall, some of it positive but most of it tinged with misery or bleakness as the price of being published and disseminated.

After Stonewall, gay male literature became focused as a movement, aided by the development of gay newspapers, magazines, and quarterlies and the founding of serious gay and lesbian bookstores.

Since Stonewall, gay and lesbian drama has flourished, especially in the United States.

Off and on over two centuries, New York City has also reigned as the capital of homosexual, transgender, and queer life in America.

Since World War II, the gay male novel has progressively flourished in England and especially in America.

The gay tradition in literature from ancient times to the present is primarily a tradition not of prose but of verse.

An early 1960s school of painting and sculpture that utilized the subjects, techniques, or stylistic conventions of popular culture, Pop Art expressed a camp sensibility.

John Ashbery, one of the leading contemporary American poets, avoids explicit gay content in his poetry, but his work shares concerns with other late twentieth-century gay writing.

One of the most accomplished poets of the twentieth century, W. H. Auden found that his gayness led him to new insights into the universal impulse to love and enlarged his understanding of all kinds of relationships.

Widely acknowledged as one of the finest twentieth-century American poets, Elizabeth Bishop encoded a lesbian identity in her poems.

Gay American expatriate composer, writer, and translator Paul Bowles liked to examine sexuality from a dispassionate perspective for its psychological suggestiveness.

Robert Duncan wrote a remarkable series of poems that deal directly with the love of men for other men.

Edward Field's poetry is an account of coming to terms with homosexuality in the literary world of New York in the second half of the twentieth century.

The forthrightly gay Allen Ginsberg is probably the best-known American poet to emerge in the post-World War II period.

The Anglo-American writer Thom Gunn was a major gay poet and a perceptive critic of gay poetry.

Richard Howard's searching and witty poetry, in which homosexuality is not a problem but a solution, is a significant contribution to the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

James Merrill's significance as a gay writer lies in his deliberate use of a personal relationship to fuel his poetry.

Howard Moss, one of the leading figures of American letters in the latter half of the twentieth century, is the author of a significant body of elegant, erudite, and urbane work, especially poetry. 

The influential poet Frank O'Hara wrote works informed by both modern art and the world of urban gay male culture.

Bisexual artist Fairfield Porter is recognized as a major twentieth-century American Intimist painter.

One of the pioneers of Pop Art, Larry Rivers was a prolific artist, sculptor, and jazz musician; although he did not identify as a bisexual, the twice-married artist had significant same-sex sexual experience.

A brilliantly original gay writer, Jack Spicer wrote poetry noted for its lyric beauty, intellectual power, and formal invention.

The androgynous persona, at once assertively virile and gracefully sensitive, of Rudolph Valentino, the most popular of silent-screen stars, threatened traditional images of American masculinity in a crucial period of cultural change.