Word: berryman
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Delmore became a member of the Harvard faculty. He joined the prestigious Partisan Review crowd. He began a long poem, Genesis, which he believed would secure his place as a poet and cultural hero. John Berryman recalled his colleague just "waiting for fame to descend...
...make one right takes a great deal of silence: also hearing nothing but one's own voice. Poetry exacts its measure of pain, but that is not to be confused with anguish. Anguish is what has obsessed many of our best-known "confessional poets," including Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. They also expressed some joys, but in the end depression always tipped the balance. Lowell fought the dank beast throughout his life. Berryman, Plath and Sexton took their own lives when, as Rilke wrote in "The Song of the Suicide," the world's profusion...
...swift vanishing of my older/ generation," Robert Lowell lamented in a sonnet not long ago, "the deaths, suicide, madness/ of Roethke, Berryman, Jarrell and Lowell." There was a justifiable pride in this facetious reference to himself, for while his contemporaries died early, Lowell seemed to thrive on middle age. He too had been humbled by madness-an experience he documented in Life Studies (1959)-but had survived to become America's most distinguished contemporary poet. When Lowell died last week of a heart attack in a New York City taxi at the age of 60, he was enjoying...
...with honors and awards, he found himself surrounded, like the wine baron in one of his last poems, by uncritical admirers. But he could still regard his immense reputation with humor and grace. "I used to want to live/ to avoid your elegy," he wrote of the late John Berryman; and he did live, if not as long as his friends or the world would have wanted, at least long enough to write...
...Henry poems included here lack some of this edgy vitality, although in the prologue to a work he never wrote, Berryman could open a prayer for inspiration in typically boisterous manner: "So screw you, Muses." Late in the book a poem begins "I didn't. And I didn't."-celebrating a suicide urge that the poet had resisted. Some 40 hours after he wrote these lines, Berryman...