Berryman is a character of literary history who was a mix of eccentricity, emotional instability, and revelatory genius. And his persona was all of his own creating: for example, this native Oklahoman insisted on speaking in a fabricated British accent, usually...
[more]Berryman is a character of literary history who was a mix of eccentricity, emotional instability, and revelatory genius. And his persona was all of his own creating: for example, this native Oklahoman insisted on speaking in a fabricated British accent, usually in the higher registers of his voice.
Once properly dignified, Berryman served an influential generation of young poets, including Phillip Levine, W.D. Snodgrass, and Donald Justice, as a dedicated and inspiring teacher. Levine remembered his mentor, "He put more energy and more time and more study into surveying our work and making suggestions, and encouraging us. Although he'd be very tough on us, I thought, he was never cruel, because he was always looking
for something to praise as well. But when he
didn't like what he didn't like, he didn't make any bones about it."
Like Roethke, Jarrell, Bishop, and other poets of his generation, Berryman looked less to free verse and more to a technically difficult and rhetorically complex poetry. His models were the works of Metaphysical poets such as Donne and Herbert, as well as the Late Modernists including Ransom and Warren. His early volumes, "Poems" (1942) and "The Dispossessed" (1948), won praise for their control and voice, but he did not gain widespread recognition for innovation until the publication of "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet" (1956). The Pulitzer Prize-winning volume "77 Dream Songs" (1964) followed, pushing his original voice and experiments to an extreme that cast his reputation as a major American poet.
Berryman shared the despair and eccentric nature of his colleague Robert Lowell (Lowell was once arrested in the streets of Bloomington while raving that he was Napoleon). But whereas Lowell's confessional poetry seemed to be told in his own voice, Berryman created the alter egos Henry and Mr. Bones, who serve as the protagonist and antagonist of the "77 Dream Songs." His poetry has a strong rhythm and a peculiar voice, often morphing from a bogus black dialect to a tripping lyric. Consider these lines from "Dream Song 4":
"Filling her compact & delicious body / with chicken paprika, she glanced at me / twice. Fainting with interest, I hungered back / and only the fact of her husband & four other people / kept me from springing on her..."
The sonnet-like poems (which number at nearly 400) leap in diction and tone, sometimes soaring to ecstatic heights only to plumb to deep despair. The result is a volume that moves beyond Henry and Mr. Bones to explore the soul and psyche of all humanity. Tragically, Berryman's emotional troubles and alcoholism proved too much for him. In 1972, he committed suicide by throwing himself off a Minneapolis bridge.
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