Word: bradstreets
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...disciple of the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats," but Yeats "could not teach me to sound like myself (whatever that was) or tell me what to write about." What drove him away from Yeats, through periods of Eliot and Auden, and finally into the ambiguous arms of Anne Bradstreet, was in part, perhaps, a violent dissatisfaction with having nothing to say. "When I finally woke up to the fact that I was involved in a long poem, one of my first thoughts was: Narrative. Let's have narrative, and at least one dominant personality, and no fragmentation--in short...
...places. Finally she dies, and stays with him as the imaginary presence from the American past we have know her to be all along; then he turns to face the very real and serious world of the twentieth century. The poem leads us through her child-marriage to Simon Bradstreet, her crossing on the Arbella in 1630, her writing, the birth of her first child, her bout with smallpox, her religious difficulties, the expulsion of Anne Hutchinson from the colony, and her later life, all over-shadowed by the image of an angry God and quivering with the rhythms...
...Berryman gets away with rhetorical excesses that would be preposterous in any other modern poet. Why? For one thing, the fact that Bradstreet is a long poem checkmates most of the poetics we have carefully engineered to deal with short lyric poems. Rhetoric is permissable when you're speaking in persona and pointing to something very great and very vague: the past. Demands of economy and tactile immediacy are more than satisfied by Berryman's aggressive, spiky, studied choice of words...
...sublimate your urge for self-projection in the posture you take toward a deliberately irrelevant subject is something else. Berryman is a little like Max Beckmann in his habits of constant self-depiction (which differs from self-revelation in that the latter is usually true), for running through Bradstreet is the image of the twentieth century poet in a tense pose of self-indulgence. But the worst that can be said of the poem is that it errs slightly in the direction of a naive, mannered Romanticism...
...seem today, is regular in terms of its formal cause: the genre. A poem on a "deep" subject--a poem as catholic in its intent as Paradise Lost--has no one model, but uses and subsumes many. Berryman had no model for the Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Harte Crane's The Bridge ("a set of lyrics") was out; Edward Arlington Robinson and Robert Browning were uncongenial ("I admire them, but I dislike them"). Eliot's Prufrock and Waste Land are disjunctive and impressionistic where Berryman's effort is continuous and expressionistic...