Word: poems
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
Seventy-Seven Dream Songs, a chunk of an unfinished long poem on which he has been working since 1955, was published two years ago by Farrar Strauss. The dream songs, in a word, are unexampled. All the difficult on a first reading; a few, for me, remain nearly opaque after many. Berryman's of-repeated description is helpful: "The poem is about a man named Henry. ('It is entirely about a man named Henry,' he told his Harvard audience last month.) He has a tendency to talk about himself in the third person. His last name is in doubt...
...cork comedy." She accuses him of "pulling human speech toward some totally disjunct and invertebrate set of noises." Such a reaction betrays a tin ear and a wooden sense of humor, for the dream songs may be one of the more successful experiments with wit in the language. The poem, taken as the whole it will someday be, acts on the imagination the way any good pun does, writ large. On the crudest level there is something cardinally and delightfully sylleptic about the fact that Henry can be both Henry House and Pussycat, Mr. Bones, the professor and the jazzman...
...showmanship, a sort of comic modesty that winds up by making him his own master of ceremonies. "No use applauding; you don't know what you're getting," he told an audience at Emerson Hall. "To make sure the evening isn't completely wasted. I'll read a poem by another man first..."He prefaced dream song #29 with a mock-heroic line: "Prepare to weep, ladies and gentlemen. Saul Bellow and I almost kill ourselves laughing about the dream songs and various chapters in his novels, but other people feel bad. Are you all ready to feel...
...Henry has an extraordinary capacity for empathy. "This poem," he said of one of the dream songs, "is but in the mouth of a sheep, a sheep of the lost tribe of Israel, who can't hear the shepherd any more...