Craft: David Schubert

David Schubert (1913-1946) was an overlooked and underrated poet who suffered so much from depression that he destroyed most of the poems he made. “Poets must sometimes look at themselves in order to remember what they are risking,” he said, and his brief life shows enormous risk. Only one book, Initial A, was published posthumously in 1961, and his poems have been mostly out of print since. In 1983, Quarterly Review of Literature made a 40th anniversary edition, also out of print, called Works and Days, that contained all extant letters and poems.

Schubert was always a young person, and never got to be old. He died of tuberculosis at 33 in Central Islip Psychiatric Center after a breakdown. He was dealt a losing hand, and if everything was different from the way it was, he’d be as significant as Robert Lowell or John Berryman, his contemporaries. Schubert’s devotion to poetry was all-consuming. It was his pressure valve, and his only interest and purpose. James Wright called him “a master of silences and a most discriminating listener.”