Word: berrymans
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Handsome, small, competitive, Jarrell was savage to the false in art; yet he spoke to his own students, in the words of Poet Robert Watson, "as if they were potential Homers." Berryman recalls the "black wit" and "cruelty" of his criticism, yet he was personally kind. Lowell himself acknowledges a debt to Jarrell, who "twice or thrice must have thrown me a lifeline...
Velvet Verse. After three centuries, time has tossed up just such a poet in John Berryman, whose Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, published in 1956, is one of the best long poems in English since Eliot's Four Quartets. He knew Anne's limitations: . . . all this bald abstract didactic rime I read appalled
...abrupt, resonant dialogue that forms the midsection of Bradstreet, Berryman was influenced by Anna Karenina and by Saul Bellow's novel Augie March, which he had just read in manuscript: "very ambitious, totally unlike most modern novels. It threw me the feeling that if I appeared to go outside the ordinary sort of business, that would be all right." The absence of any clear poetic precedent forces the reader to make a major revision of his conventional expectations...
...second answer runs deeper. Talk about Berryman keeps coming back to subject-matter, to content rather than form, to purposes rather than techniques. Just as the subject of Bradstreet, in the deepest sense, is Bradstreet, the Dream Songs are "about" Henry by God, and if Berryman's public descriptions of Henry are cagey, he is no more willing to divert the audience with coy adversions to his own skills or state of mind. For a long time poetry in this country has been working with an arsenal of familiar tools--"effects," "devices" and "meanings"--all largely technical considerations. Such...
...Berryman's work simply cannot be read this way. None of the great creative violations of convention in literary history can be. Literature redeems itself by going the limit, by taking the same sort of risks that Berryman found in Augie March in the form of "an inquisitiveness, let's call it that, so extreme that it becomes a way of life, a tempting, a touching of all the boundaries..." No one, of course, can take risks who doesn't know the rules, but what is perhaps most impressive about John Berryman is his unwillingness to define expertise in purely...