Word: berryman
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DELUSIONS, ETC. byJOHN BERRYMAN 69 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...Though Berryman was a mature poet of far greater range and accomplishment than Sylvia Plath, the manner of their deaths makes some comparison inevitable. The most arresting similarity is a common rage and mourning for the loss of a father in childhood. Apparently there is no healing this deep, mysterious psychic wound, and Berryman's complaint is harsher than Plath's. Her father succumbed to disease; his shot himself. "When will indifference come," he pleaded in Dream Songs...
Increasingly, Berryman's work has shown a desperate man. In Delusions he reached the terminal realization that for him nothing was going to work -not love or fame, children or friends, not God himself. The best poems are religious. Brought up in the Roman Catholic Church, Berryman left it early, only to return in his last years, partly because his third wife, Kate, was Catholic. Instead of consolation he found God a heavy burden. Contemplation became an obsessive examination of conscience...
ELIOT and his followers thus made the mistake of refining themselves clear out of our common sensibility. This was an across the board sweep affecting all the arts. Eliot and Pound, along with Robert Lowell and John Berryman, have as little to do with our basic experiences as I.M. Pei has to do with Route 66, Dickey holds up Theodore Roethke, the Michigan poet who celebrated the greenhouses and gardens of his early life with simple, crystalline language, as the kind of poet who can bring off the new poetic revolution against these oppressive forces. Roethke is a good start...
Died. John Berryman, 57, poet; by leaping from a bridge near the University of Minnesota's Minneapolis campus, where he taught. Berryman was a consummate verbal technician who had a deep love affair with the blowziest aspects of 20th century popular culture. Robert Lowell said that Berryman's "universe is more tearful and funny than we can easily bear." To help himself bear temptation, Berryman became a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. His 77 Dream Songs won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize and four years later the National Book Award went to His Toy, His Dream, His Rest...