Word: berrymans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...What the hell is happiness?" John Berryman once asked his first wife, the author of this memoir. He added another question: "Should a poet seek it?" For Berryman and many other poets of his generation, the answer seems to have been no. They did not flame out young, like Keats and Shelley. But few of them enjoyed their later years, and they are all gone now: Berryman, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke and Delmore Schwartz. They left behind some splendid poems and some terribly sad histories of alcoholism, mental illness, despair and suicide...
...says. But since that tumultuous period, which he said had "the highest concentration of really fine writing," student work has become more varied. Part of the reason, he says, is a lack of commanding writers. He cites Saul Bellow, Walker Percy, Bernard Malamud, and the poets John Berryman and Robert Lowell as influential, but he says no single writer or school is dominant. "All the students I see have read quite a bit," he says, "but there are curiously few intersections among their reading." Besides a drift away from confessional stories, and "a great deal more comic writing...
...well as On Extended Wings, she's also written The Poetry of George Herbert.) Her absorption with Stevens is natural. After all, he is the "host" of Vendler's party, and he contributes the title of her book. Vendler has tucked it away in her review of John Berryman's Dream Songs in which Henry, Berryman's persona, is "as part of nature, a part of us." And in her foreword, Vendler expands upon this theme...