Word: berryman
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...initiate a fresh dialogue between the poet and his audience. What has emerged in the U.S. is a crop of poets who cannot be pigeonholed in schools or academies, whether they are writing in free verse or with a conscious debt to form. Among them, James Dickey and John Berryman have become the most prominent, while Robert Lowell continues to be the most profound force among the more formal American poets...
...DREAM, HIS REST by John Berryman. 317 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...Dream Songs, Berryman introduced his readers to Henry, whom he describes in his latest collection as "an imaginary character (not the poet, not me), a white American in early middle age, sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss." Henry's world is modern man's world, particularly the world of the past eleven years, and embraces the whole range of human experience...
...Berryman's new collection (Songs 78 to 385) completes the work started in 77 Dream Songs. As in the first volume, Henry figures as the central character; occasionally a friend, who is never named, addresses him as "Mr. Bones." The songs' idiom is always peculiarly American, peculiarly Berryman. It is a successful combination of colloquial dialects and a modern, jazzy, discordant line that continually startles...
Others have written with an equal bitterness about the War, about estrangement, about the uncomfortable timidity of poets in America (I'm thinking of the anthology of Poets on Vietnam, Hayden Carruth's "On a Certain Engagement South of Seoul," or Berryman's "Formal Elegy" on the death of President Kennedy). Yet Wilbur has referred to these events in passing, as if to recognize their presence without allowing them to oppress his spirit, knowing the limits of indignations...