Word: berryman
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...Berryman gets away with rhetorical excesses that would be preposterous in any other modern poet. Why? For one thing, the fact that Bradstreet is a long poem checkmates most of the poetics we have carefully engineered to deal with short lyric poems. Rhetoric is permissable when you're speaking in persona and pointing to something very great and very vague: the past. Demands of economy and tactile immediacy are more than satisfied by Berryman's aggressive, spiky, studied choice of words...
Constantly you feel that Berryman is daring to say something oceanic, then returning to the concrete with a thump or a blast. And the man is absolute master of his materials, which points less toward facility in the use of stanzas, rhymes, and meters--like Auden's--than toward an utter control over all the possible sounds and meanings of each word...
...question of causes--formal and final--arises. Many critics have reacted unfavorably to the whole project. Why do it at all? Like a Tiffany vase without a mouth, what's it for? Speaking of conception as well as of language, Stanly Kunitz remarks "Berryman is tempted to inflate what he cannot subjugate." The effort to conquer an old emminence grise from the American past may be thought of as a false one, a spurious gesture of research toward a subject that is just not real...
...concerned this is the only objection that can be raised to the poem. To write about yourself extrinsically and comically, as in the Dream Songs, is one thing: to sublimate your urge for self-projection in the posture you take toward a deliberately irrelevant subject is something else. Berryman is a little like Max Beckmann in his habits of constant self-depiction (which differs from self-revelation in that the latter is usually true), for running through Bradstreet is the image of the twentieth century poet in a tense pose of self-indulgence. But the worst that can be said...
...aesthetic order of a poem like Lycidas, random as it may seem today, is regular in terms of its formal cause: the genre. A poem on a "deep" subject--a poem as catholic in its intent as Paradise Lost--has no one model, but uses and subsumes many. Berryman had no model for the Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Harte Crane's The Bridge ("a set of lyrics") was out; Edward Arlington Robinson and Robert Browning were uncongenial ("I admire them, but I dislike them"). Eliot's Prufrock and Waste Land are disjunctive and impressionistic where Berryman's effort is continuous...