Word: berrymans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...anthology ended with a collection of modern poetry from such writers as John Berryman and Robert Lowell, as well as a poem by Frank O'Hara, whose work was first performed by the original Poets' Theatre in the 1950s...
...remained. He was not alone. Robert Lowell's closest friends and fellow poets, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman and Theodore Roethke, were also emotionally retarded. The poets, observes Jeffrey Meyers, "felt they should seek suffering rather than happiness . . . All four poets obsessively pursued their private myths, and persuaded each other and the public to believe them." Eventually, an inability to grow damaged the quartet beyond repair...
...severely disturbed, opening his psychic wounds and bleeding into confessional verse. But they all went a step beyond, steeping in self- pity, some sabotaging their marriages with meaningless affairs, others sniping at colleagues and then placing blame elsewhere. "American society would drive anybody out of his skull," fumed Berryman...
...Berryman was next. After heated sonnets on the subject of suicide, the 57- year-old leaped off a bridge: "In a modesty of death I join my father" said one of his late poems. Lowell once noted that he and his friends "go at it with such single-minded intensity that we are always on the point of drowning." Now the survivor lost the will to compete. When he suffered his last heart attack at 60, his third wife called it a "suicide wish." In "Middle Age," he had written, "I forgive/ those I/ have injured...
Eileen Simpson, who wrote Poets in Their Youth (1982), an admirable memoir of her marriage to the poet John Berryman, was an orphan too, but what she calls a "lucky one." Some luck. When she was eleven months old, her mother succumbed to tuberculosis; her father later put her and her older sister in a Catholic convent school, and she learned at the age of six that he had suddenly died of ptomaine poisoning. Convent life was benign but austere. Three winters in a row she suffered pneumonia so severe that a priest administered Extreme Unction...