Word: berrymans
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THERE IS a new mood of tolerance and cooperation among black students at Harvard. "We want to hear all viewpoints," says Jackie Berryman, director of the Afro-American Cultural Center, and her statement is indicative of a new willingness of black students with varying political and social philosophies to work together toward common goals. Unlike the period between 1968 and 1971 when black students were coerced by their peers into mouthing a Pan-Africanist line, there is a feeling that each individual should decide has own political stance, and then come together with the group in order to work...
...primary emphasis of his poetry is on the need for some sort of protections. In a poem on Dylan Thomas, Berryman claims that in his last years Thomas expressed a great interest in the Garden of Eden and its flowers, but little in their creator. The point seems equally applicable to Berryman. He was more interested in enjoying the creation than in glorifying the Creator. This poetry is not a celebration of God but the expression of a modern man's need...
...Trakl and Dylan Thomas. This group is followed by 13 miscellaneous poems with subjects as diverse as suicide, Christ and the fall of man. The fourth section contains two poems reprinted from the April 1969 Harvard Advocate. The poems, "Henry's Understanding" and "Henry by Night," were offshoots of Berryman's longest poem, Dream Songs. The first volume of that work, 77 Dream Songs, won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and its second volume, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, won the 1969 National Book Award...
...BERRYMAN's MOST recent book does not possess the unity necessary for comparision with a work of the magnitude of Dream Songs. At least one of the poems included in Delusions, Etc., "Scholars at the Orchid Pavilon," was begun over 20 years ago. Only its first section, the "Opus Dei," composed of the poems following the offices of the day, has the sustained internal coherence necessary to approach the consistent outlook of Dream Songs, and those eight poems are on a much more modest scale. In this final book, Berryman has created no character of the engaging importance of Henry...
THEIR OVERALL EFFECT is depressing. Not that they are not on occasion technically impressive. Berryman combined extraordinary erudition with a carefully cultivated colloquial voice to produce difficult poems rich in meaning. Sometimes the seams of the combination show: more often the result is a penetrating piece of work. But the remains obsessed with his personal misfortunes. He fails to give any specific idea of what their roots might be and concentrates on the possibility of refuge from his problems in an equally unspecific God. He manages to create a mood in time, but it has neither origins nor resolution...