Word: berrymans
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Where other poets since the War, notably Lowell and John Berryman, have unceasingly sought and exhausted their techniques before arriving at masterpieces like Life Studies and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, Wilbur began and has continued in delight, while (to alter Frost's remark) wisdom has shown no signs of desertion. Here are two stanzas from "In the Field...
...difficult to talk about the arrangement of the poems. The ordering of the 385 is no doubt important, but I do not understand its logic. The books seem to be arranged by the time and place they were written. Book VII was written during Berryman's stay in Ireland; Book VI is a leave-taking of America, and it starts with the leave-taking of a friend -- the ten elegies on Delmore Schwartz; Book V seems to center on a stay in the hospital; Book IV is mysteriously entitled "Opus Posthumous." Each book ends on an upbeat...
...clear climaxes and denouments. Each instant is equal. "The Dream Songs" starts and ends in the middle of Henry's life. It goes nowhere and proves nothing, but that Henry is Henry and is still alive. The pattern, if there is one, may not be evident even to Berryman, and certainly not to Henry. Berryman says "its ultimate structure ... [is] according to his [Henry's] nature" (293), but that is not much help to the reader...
WHAT IS CLEAR is that Berryman is "tense with love" (279), though "truly isolated, pal," (203). He has wrestled out of himself a "yes" to the world and his own soul, and in the meantime he has created a delightful, profound, and moving poem. What Berryman means to say escapes him, as it must. Like all poets he longs for something he will never find, something he cannot even see. That something fills him with "nostalgia for things unknown" (211), but he knows it is beyond...
...talking of the poet as he sees himself; the reader sees something different. Picture a seagull unhappy, hungry for a clam. He flies in perfect beauty, a perfect grace visible to all eyes but his own. John Berryman, however difficult his own muddle may be, exhibits to us a true grace of craftsmanship and earnestness...