Word: berrymans
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...major events of Lowell's life--his imprisonment for conscientious objection, his routine hospitalizations and separations from lovers, his feelings of doom in reaction to the deaths of T.S. Eliot, Randall Jarell, John Berryman, and other friends, his opposition to the Vietnam War--are interesting but tangential to Hamilton's defense of Lowell's place in modern poetry. In the end, questions such as insanity and its relationship to love and genius are left unanswered. Hamilton simply leaves us with a wealth of well-presented source material to use in thinking about these questions. It is an important gift...
...generation seemed almost too proper a Bostonian. Students in his classroom at Boston University during the '50s (including Sylvia Plath) found him "diffident" and "reserved." His "mild, myopic manner" hardly placed him in the company of the wild men of letters, like his friends Delmore Schwartz and John Berryman. But Lowell, as the English poet-critic Ian Hamilton reveals in this melancholy biography, was the wildest of them...
...What the hell is happiness?" John Berryman once asked his first wife, the author of this memoir. He added another question: "Should a poet seek it?" For Berryman and many other poets of his generation, the answer seems to have been no. They did not flame out young, like Keats and Shelley. But few of them enjoyed their later years, and they are all gone now: Berryman, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke and Delmore Schwartz. They left behind some splendid poems and some terribly sad histories of alcoholism, mental illness, despair and suicide...
Although she is a practicing psychotherapist, Author Eileen Simpson does not try to explain why so many talented writers became so self-destructive. Instead, she looks back affectionately to happier times, when careers were just beginning and prospects bright. Her marriage to Berryman in 1942 brought her abruptly into a small intense world where the subject of poetry superseded all others. She took on both a husband and a calling: "To be the 'helpmate' . . . to a poet would be the most interesting and useful way for a woman to spend her life." Berryman, then 28 and an English...
...says. But since that tumultuous period, which he said had "the highest concentration of really fine writing," student work has become more varied. Part of the reason, he says, is a lack of commanding writers. He cites Saul Bellow, Walker Percy, Bernard Malamud, and the poets John Berryman and Robert Lowell as influential, but he says no single writer or school is dominant. "All the students I see have read quite a bit," he says, "but there are curiously few intersections among their reading." Besides a drift away from confessional stories, and "a great deal more comic writing...