Word: lyrically
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This fully articulate dissatisfaction with the limits of the lyric form led him to adopt a rather insignificant historical figure and build an imaginary relationship with her. "Why did I choose to write about this boring high-minded Puritan woman who may have been our first American poet but is not a good one?" In a way, he says, "she chose me." "Your deep subjects, I'm talking about attempts at major poetry, not lyrics or meditative poems, they come and take hold of you... The point is to throw as much light as possible on her, and apparently...
...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...
which gently and coldly present a lynching in the deep South. And some take Bonesian lyric postures toward experience that is clearly Henry's. The dream songs succeed in conveying all the angst and confusion of a nightmare--the hellish switchings of identy, the loss or mutilation of the physical self--in a form that is scrupulously lyric, based on the canzone, containing (usually) eighteen lines, and variously rhymed...
...gentilities, and wherever the itinerant Shakespeareans try to move their goods (wallah is Hindi for peddler), they meet stiff sales resistance. Indians, like most of the rest of the world, have forsaken the theater for the film, and the cheapest movie actress means more to them than the most lyric Lear. The once-prominent troupe, reduced by death and penury to mother, father and ingenue daughter, stops play acting to settle for one-night stands of "Gems from Shakespeare." The daughter, by now caught in a hopeless triangle between an Indian boy and his film-star mistress, sails...
...Supreme songs the girls tried almost worked. It was "Somewhere," and Diana's throaty lyric quieted the crowd to a whisper, but then she succumbed to a long, Shangri-la-like spoken dialogue concerning trees, birds, and other embarrassing items. The audience succumbed to a titter...