Delmore Schwartz

It was formerly so that merit and grace could be estimated in short fiction by the reader’s experiencing the prose with a full memory of every element in the story: character, character names, characterizations; the path, the scene, the savors: the whole effect. At some point after a war – let us say that it was ninety years ago and in the 1960s – the author replaced cuddling his or her writing with fucking his or her writing; it was observed that there was something intriguing and beautiful about the implosion of the language cathedral; and immanent in every text was a thesaurus, a concordance, the New York Review of Books, and a cocktail party bully. Literature became a chameleon on a mirror.
Thereafter fiction became a wobbling pivot, and a vortex of profusional prospects.

No one wrote better than Delmore Schwartz, before his several-decades of parlous decline, or wiser spies of Gotham made:
IN DREAMS BEGIN RESPONSIBILITIES
THE WORLD IS A WEDDING
A DREAM OF WHITMAN PARAPHRASED, RECOGNIZED,
AND MADE MORE VIVID BY RENOIR
but Schwartz had foreseen such literary congresses, implosions, and monumental reflexivities. Ever we tend to or must heap upon the broad ashlands the visionaries who undermine our temples. If we cannot recognize ourselves in his 1930s failures and persons who sell themselves snake oil, perhaps all we deserve is the blanked rubbing alcohol of Carver and the Carveroids, who play at junior high hops.