Schuyler credited Smeltzer with opening “windows for me on / flowering fields and bays where the water greenly danced, / Knifed into waves by wind: the day he disclosed William Carlos / Williams to us, writing a short and seemingly / Senseless poem on the blackboard.” Smeltzer also piqued Jimmy’s interest with a mention of James Joyce’s Ulysses. However, when Jimmy asked after class for more information about Ulysses, which had been banned in this country as obscene until 1933, Smeltzer chuckled and said, “When you’re in college it will be time enough.” Annoyed by Smeltzer’s coy hypocrisy, Jimmy went to Buffalo and, as he related in “The Morning of the Poem,” bought a copy of the book from Otto Ulrich’s bookshop, where John Bernard Myers, later a prominent figure in the New York art and poetry world, then worked as a salesclerk. Jimmy recalled him as a “big white whale” who loomed over him one day as he was reading in a corner of the shop, and said “You look like an interesting boy,” and gave him a copy of his magazine, Upstate. Jimmy’s rumored possession of Ulysses lent him unwonted status in the eyes of the high school jocks, normally oblivious to his very existence. He managed to get the book into the house, past his suspicious stepfather, by telling Berton it was a socially conscious book “about poor people in Ireland.”
Despite Smeltzer’s introducing him to William Carlos Williams’s poetry, Jimmy did not read him in earnest until he was in college, when he especially loved the “complete freedom” in his work. Through anthologies he also discovered Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, D. H. Lawrence, and other modernist poets. Lawrence and Stevens had probably the most impact, and over the next few years he came to feel he had memorized Harmonium and The Man with the Blue Guitar and Ideas of Order.
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