Word: berrymans
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...DREAM, HIS REST, by John Berryman; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $6.50. All sections quoted are copyright by John Berryman. Dream Song 172 appears through the courtesy of Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...about "the ghost or two"--the handful of fragile souls that Jarrell forsesaw clustering about his grave? Instead we have nothing less than the United States Cultural All-Star Team. Robert Lowell, John Berryman, John Crowe Ransom, Marianne Moore, James Dickey, Allen Tate, Robert Fitzgerald, Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, Leslie A. Fiedler, Hannah Arendt, all take the podium...
...subject of his successful criticism weren't always so happy. While he could communicate his enthusiasms with joyful immediacy, he could and did destroy bad books with a few merciless phrases. "He was immensely cruel," John Berryman writes, "and the extraordinary thing about it is that he didn't know he was cruel." Jarrell had some pity for bad poets ("it is as if writers had sent you their ripped out arms and legs with 'This is a poem' scrawled on them in lipstick.") but he could write nothing kind about their poems. And even a few of his memorialists...
...secrecy, the frequent long separations, and the impropriety of the affair still rankle, prompting Berryman to hope "Sometime to dine with you. Sometime to go / Sober to bed, a proper citizen." The hope apparently becomes a proposal a decision to bring the affair into a more legitimate and more credible, context...
...with Berryman's sonnets there is a difference. Lise, excellent lady, is neither untouched nor particularly virtuous. Crimes of adultery and deception have been committed. Nor is the poet attempting either a temporary seduction (already accomplished) or (at first) a permanent possession of the Lady. The affair is intense; its emotions range from guilt and despair to real joy and momentary hope. Berryman attempts to involve the excellent lady in all of that intensity and emotional chaos. The guilt and self-effacement, he insists, should be shared as well as the joy; after an octet's abstract discussion of adultery...