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...poet who is attempting what many consider to be the most radical of recent experiments with language--the Dream Songs--John Berryman's poetic is ruthlessly functional. "The ordinary modern reader is sound asleep...Eliot understood this very well, in the Waste Land; it's necessary to kick him, otherwise he won't perform, and if he doesn't perform there's no poem. Because a poem is a reciprocal kind of action between the writer and the reader. No reader, no poem. It's like unperformed music, Bach scores lying in manuscript for hundreds of years. That's what...

Author: By Stuart A. Davis, | Title: John Berryman-II | 4/13/1966 | See Source »

Remarks like this are always startling when you're used to hearing delicate technical circumlocutions from poets, discussions of style at the expense of content. We have very thoroughly withdrawn from the theory of messages, Berryman no less than most; but the man is fully as anxious to see people grasp what the poem is about as he is to alarm and confuse them with unusual language. He began writing, he says, "as a burning trivial disciple of the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats," but Yeats "could not teach me to sound like myself (whatever that was) or tell...

Author: By Stuart A. Davis, | Title: John Berryman-II | 4/13/1966 | See Source »

...love with her husband and with more than that, quietly violent in her sexual self-expression--the "always heretic" that is the poet in any language at any time. Whether this persona bears more than a verbal similarity to her prototype is a question better not asked, for Berryman's Homage is even less like history than the average historical novel...

Author: By Stuart A. Davis, | Title: John Berryman-II | 4/13/1966 | See Source »

...poem is no wearying topical exercise in verse-biography. The stanza-form, Berryman's invention, is difficult; the language is astonishing...

Author: By Stuart A. Davis, | Title: John Berryman-II | 4/13/1966 | See Source »

Proust might have objected that he was real, while Marcel was in the book. What sets Berryman off from Henry is not the simple ontological difference between a character and a person, but the anguish and brilliance of Berryman's effort to make the distinction between the two of them clear and efficient. It is as if the poet, arguing from a feared poverty of emotional or experiential resources, has peopled his poem with a number of lively selves that cooperate in the restoration of personality. A bright, bitter, courtly, intensely human man is writing an autobiographical poem that turns...

Author: By Stuart A. Davis, | Title: John Berryman - 1 | 4/12/1966 | See Source »

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