Word: berrymans
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While these new poets have their own unique styles, they share the common experience of studying at Harvard under teachers such as Robert Fitzgerald, Lowell and Bishop. And these poets also say they grew up with the legacy of writers like Berryman and Schwartz, who did not survive long enough to teach the new generation...
Eileen Simpson, Berryman's wife, agrees that the older generation of literary artists used their writing to help them survive their many difficult experiences. In her book, Poets in Their Youth, she writes that for her husband, "the only thing was to write poetry. All else was wasted time...
According to Eileen Simpson, poet John Berryman's widow, the seeds of the poets' destruction were sown early in their childhood. For example, Berryman's crippling emotional problems were caused in part by his difficult relationship with his mother, she writes in her book Poets in Their Youth...
Perhaps because he thought his father killed himself, suicide always hung like a shadow over Berryman's life, Simpson writes. She recalls an incident after a drunken prenuptial party in New York when Berryman fought with his mother and then leapt onto the narrow railing of her apartment terrace many stories above the city streets...
...Berryman was not unique among the earlier poets in having a troubled childhood. Delmore Schwartz's relationship with his mother was also occasionally explosive, Simpson writes. And Robert Lowell hinted at the sadness of his childhood in his later confessional poems, one of which describes his fictional stay in a mental asylum where all the patients were from Harvard and all the monitors came from Boston University...