Word: mistressful
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...mistress me from air. Unbraced...
...random as it may 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...
Berrymar has united academic and creative pursuits more successfully than most recent poets. His Crane biography is the work of a strenuously intelligent man wrestling with one of his familiars; his first long poem, the Homage to Mistress Bradstreet(1953) treat a necessarily arcane subject, America's first poetress, the "tenth muse" Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672). It is a work of scholarship in fifty-seven stanzas that took four and half years to research. And his most recent book cangles whimsically with that ever less unattractive, increasingly charismatic image: the college professor...
...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 for a Britain she has never seen. The Indian summer of the English colonial, the film implies, is over...
...conflict is like this: Should Zhivago be allowed to live an idyllic existence, alternating between his wife, Geraldine Chaplin, and his mistress, Julie Christie, and all the while pen those poems? Or should he, like any decent fellow, devote some of his energies to aiding his fellow...