Word: affair
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...secrecy, the frequent long separations, and the impropriety of the affair still rankle, prompting Berryman to hope "Sometime to dine with you. Sometime to go / Sober to bed, a proper citizen." The hope apparently becomes a proposal a decision to bring the affair into a more legitimate and more credible, context...
...with Berryman's sonnets there is a difference. Lise, excellent lady, is neither untouched nor particularly virtuous. Crimes of adultery and deception have been committed. Nor is the poet attempting either a temporary seduction (already accomplished) or (at first) a permanent possession of the Lady. The affair is intense; its emotions range from guilt and despair to real joy and momentary hope. Berryman attempts to involve the excellent lady in all of that intensity and emotional chaos. The guilt and self-effacement, he insists, should be shared as well as the joy; after an octet's abstract discussion of adultery...
...mutual involvement in the affair (and the sonnets) becomes more intense when the poet and the mistress ally against (hypothetically) skeptical readers...
...poet, however, becomes the victim of his own exhortation: his rhetoric helps to clarify the futility of the affair. If he is successful, if he draws Lise finally into the experience of furtive and illicit love, he prevents the affair from ever becoming permanent. They cannot publicize their love...
...gismo would pass muster when an objective observer rather than Serios is holding the gismo, etc.). Neither does the posited gimmick explain certain notable examples of Serios's pictures described below. The moderate approach fails because the effect of Eisenbud's documentation is to polarize opinion about the Serios affair. There seems to me to be only two opinions possible: 1) Serios is honest and his abilities are genuine; 2) Serios and Eisenbud, and some largish number of witnesses, are involved in a grand collusive hoax...