Word: berryman
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...poet introduces John Berryman and his sonnets...
...ironic and playful mispronunciation of his feelings. She may indeed have been excellent, but the sonnets reveal that she was also inconsiderate, thoroughly unpredictable, a heavy drinker (perhaps alcoholic), and the wife of a close friend. It still hurts just to remember the lady and his responses to her. Berryman would like us to believe that it all happened when he was still a boy, not a lover, only a wuver...
...Berryman is too precise a poet, too careful with his words, and too honest about himself not to have done this completely intentionally. His little statement about his "wuv" prepares the reader pretty well for the 115 sonnets it introduces. With the same accurate, often ironic, self-assessment, and with the passion which those two lines betray. Berryman set out to explore and compose his contradictory reactions to the excellent lady, his adulterous lover...
Another modern poet might have preferred a single long poem to examine and express his emotional contradictions (Roethke's The Lost Son), or perhaps a series of poems less restrictive in form than the sonnet (Snod-grass Heart's Needle). But Berryman chose a sequence of sonnets, a selection which is initially mysterious: a sonnetter inherits elaborate conventions of expression so often used as to seem, almost invariably, stale and uncommunicative to a modern audience. Berryman enthusiastically accepts these restrictions and puts them to work for himself. A single sonnet is particularly suited to the elaborate presentation of one feeling...
...with Berryman's sonnets. Recognizing that a sonnet sequence was just what he wanted to write, he animated the conventions, utilized the restrictions, and made himself a sonneteer...