Word: berryman
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What do they mean, and why? Berryman is distrustful of most critical postures taken toward contemporary (really contemporary) writing. ("You know," he said, "I can smell a bad book without even opening it. I almost never review them,") And if he has little use for certain critics, resting on descriptive generalizations about his poems and resisting all the slick formulas, the critics have developed very little...
...Yorker review by Louise Bogan is perhaps the most dangerous, since it comes from someone who should know better. "Berryman is out to get language itself, to distort and maim it, not in the direction of wit but in the direction of funny grammar and burnt-cork comedy." She accuses him of "pulling human speech toward some totally disjunct and invertebrate set of noises." Such a reaction betrays a tin ear and a wooden sense of humor, for the dream songs may be one of the more successful experiments with wit in the language. The poem, taken as the whole...
...remaining books of Dream Songs are published. There are over three hundred songs, in various stages of development; the next collection will contain eighty-four and will be called His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. Until then the very best public interpretation of the man remains 'Miss Rich's" "Berryman earns (his diction) by generating verbal heat, consistently, from within...He is a bruised, raging and fiendishly intelligent man and he has found way of being all three simultaneously...
...immediate observation you are tempted to make is that Henry and Berryman resemble each other strikingly. Both are often teaches: both like jazz, women and Negroes; both are appelled by certain areas of human experience, like Nazi Germany; both are formal and a little old-fashioned; both emphasize beautifully...
...Berryman's remarks about his own work, of course, must be taken with a little salt and some cool water. They are devastatingly commonsensical. "There's been an effort, sponsored by Lowell and by other people, to identify me with Henry, which won't work, because I'm obviously not Henry, I mean I have a social security number, and pay taxes, and have an insurance policy and so forth; whereas Henry is a completely undetermined human American male, seeking his identity, and being dissatisfied with it when it is found. I don't buy any of that...