the words weren't mine

Before arriving in the city, Schuyler attempted college and flunked out; he then joined the Navy. He had his first breakdown in college after his father’s death; he subsequently went AWOL. After he turned himself in, he was imprisoned on Hart Island among the potter’s fields, and the ghosts of women prisoners. When he was released, he was dishonorably discharged for both his disappearance and for his sexuality. Back out in New York, broke, Schuyler’s friends began to figure out ways to provide for him—jobs, apartments, pin money. This would be a lifelong pattern: friends helped him live in ways that system and state tried mightily to prevent. 

Incarceration on Hart Island left Schuyler traumatized; he had a tremor. He had acquired a fear of public speaking after the military interrogations he endured there, leaving him unwilling to read his poems before audiences for almost his whole life. (He had a second reason: poems were, for him, a written medium.) Not that there were poems yet. read more

IMAGE: Alfred Eisenstaedt