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John Berryman is best known as the author of The Dream Songs, an unconventional, innovative poem sequence often compared to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass for its magnitude and uniquely American voice. His poetry, often chaotic and idiosyncratic, reflected his life and relationships. A major figure in American post-war poetry, Berryman is often credited as one of the founders of Confessional poetry.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

A Tortured Artist

Berryman’s experiences played a crucial role in determining the subject and form of his poetry. He was born John Smith in McAlester, Oklahoma, and was twelve years old when his father commit ted suicide. His mother quickly remarried, and his surname changed from Smith to Berryman. As an adolescent, Berryman attended a private school in Connecticut where he was bullied by fellow students and unsuccessfully attempted suicide. At Columbia University in New York, Berryman studied poetry under Mark Van Doren, whom he considered his mentor. He received an academic fellowship to Cambridge University in England, where he studied Shakespeare and met W. H. Auden,

Dylan Thomas, and the elderly William Butler Yeats. Berryman taught at various universities throughout his adult life, including Harvard, Princeton, and, from 1958 until his death, at the University of Minnesota. He was renowned as a charismatic and formidably intelligent teacher. Berryman’s public demeanor contrasted greatly with the insecure and sometimes morbid personality found in much of his work. Like his friend Dylan Thomas, Berryman was given to outrageous public behavior, including drunkenness and inappropriate sexual conduct. Berryman was married three times, and, during the final two decades of his life, he struggled to overcome an alcohol and pill addiction. In 1972, he took his own life. Many literary historians believe that the death of his bio logical father heavily influenced both Berryman’s poetry and his life.

Growth as a Poet

Much of the poetry Berryman produced in the 1940s is imitative of the highly allusive, impersonal verse favored by critics and academics at the time. Berryman’s first collection, simply titled (1942), is characterized by well-crafted verse often focusing on other works of art rather than human concerns. Although noting the poems were products of an obviously educated and sensitive mind, critics generally found the pieces in Poems too studied and rhetorical to be moving. Berryman’s second volume, The Dispossessed (1948), was also faulted for these reasons. While critics generally agree that Berryman had yet to master the distinctive voices he emulated, ”The Nervous Songs” from The Dispossessed are considered exceptional. Utilizing a flexible, though regular form, and taking the poet himself for its subject, ”The Nervous Songs” are often seen as forerunners of The Dream Songs.

In 1947, Berryman began an adulterous affair with the wife of a Princeton graduate student. The intense feelings of guilt, joy, and pain he felt throughout this period inspired a frenzied outpouring of verse, which, when it was published twenty years later, became Berry man’s Sonnets. Republished in the posthumous Collected Poems 1937-1971 as Sonnets to Chris, these verses chronicle the ongoing affair in broken and twisted syntax mixed with archaic phrases within the form of the Petrarchan sonnet. Berryman’s name for his lover in the sonnets, ”Lise,” was changed to ”Chris,” the real name of the woman who had been his lover, in the posthumous collection. ”Lise” is considered an anagram after the Elizabethan fashion for ”lies.” Although it was published after Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956) and 77Dream Songs (1964), Berryman’s Sonnets is the poet’s first successful incorporation of the events of his life into his art.

Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, Berryman’s next published volume, is often viewed as a sublimation of his adultery and consequent guilt and remorse. This long poem blends historical facts regarding Anne Bradstreet’s life with creative embellishments, as Bradstreet, the first American poet, is summoned by the speaker, who falls in love with her. Berryman’s personal obsessions, including adulterous longings, loss, creative difficulties, God, and the poet’s relation to his society, are thematic elements in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Some critics accused Berry man of creating an elaborate mirror for his personal concerns, yet the poem is generally considered a successful work of art in which structure and theme cohere on a number of metaphorical levels. Gary Q. Arpin remarked: “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet is in many ways Berryman’s central work, the breakthrough that fulfills earlier promises of genius and makes new promises for the future.”

Dream Songs and Final Works

The Dream Songs is Berryman’s most celebrated accomplishment. First published in two parts as 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, several hundred dream songs have been published, including those collected in a posthumous volume, Henry’s Fate and Other Poems: 1967-1972. Each song is comprised of three six-line stanzas of irregular rhyme and meter. The persona, variously called Henry House, Henry Pussycat, and Mr. Bones, shares similar life circumstances, experiences, and friends with Berryman, and is usually considered interchangeable with him. The Dream Songs is an ambitious amalgam of obscure allusions, twisted and fragmented syntax, and minstrel-show language. The tone of these songs ranges from comedy to pathos, and the series of elegies for Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, and Sylvia Plath are considered among the best in the dream song mode. Topical issues are also a concern in some of the songs, including the deaths of such prominent figures as President John F. Kennedy and Reverend Martin Luther King. Death, particularly the suicide of Berryman’s father, is considered to overshadow this extended poem sequence. Unlike Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, one of Berryman s models, The Dream Songs, does not contain a philosophy, but rather an extended character study of a multi-faceted, troubled, American persona.

Love and Fame and Delusions, Etc. are the last collections of Berryman s work published under his own direction. Extremely personal in subject matter, the majority of these poems are memoirs in verse regarding such unusual poetic matters as money and Berryman s grades in school. His ”Eleven Addresses to the Lord, which conclude Love and Fame, are considered among the most moving and subtle religious poems in contemporary American literature.

As an unnamed critic for the Times Literary Supplement wrote in 1973, ”The last books have an intense but narrowly documentary appeal,” and represent ”the brave valediction of a man who chose his own way to die.” In 1971, Berryman won a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in order to complete a critical biography of Shakespeare, but he would not live to do so. He committed suicide by jumping from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis on January 7, 1972.

Works in Literary Context

The ”Middle Generation” and Confessionalism

Credited as an early practitioner of such postmodern techniques as unreliable narration, multiple viewpoints, and pastiche, Berryman created fragmentary verses that reflect his view of the chaotic nature of existence— although at times he worried his pieces were too fragmentary. In a 1962 letter to Robert Lowell, Berryman worried that his dream songs ”are partly independent but only if . . . the reader is familiar with Henry’s tone, personality, friend, activities; otherwise, in small numbers, they seem simply crazy …” but many good critics have demonstrated not only the folly of accusing the poem of confessional self-indulgence and disorder, but also that what Berryman thought a weakness was actually a strength.

This confessional aspect of his poetry is what has associated Berryman with both the ”Middle Generation” of poets, those who came to maturity between the World Wars, as well as with such Confessional poets as Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, who wrote intense lyrics reflecting their volatile emotional states. Berryman’s distinctive verse encompasses a broad range of subject matter, occasional use of strict, traditional forms, and a skillful mixture of pathos, farce, and sentimentality. Influenced by W. B. Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and W. H. Auden, Berry-man’s poetry has been described as nervous, humorous, and difficult.

Meditations on Pain and Death

Berryman believed that feelings might be imaginatively controlled through art, and hoped that The Dream Songs might be as useful to the reader as to himself. The Dream Songs, which Berry-man called an epic, is a poem as ambitious as Walt Whit man’s Song of Myself, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, or Hart Crane’s The Bridge, but unlike Song of Myself, for instance, it proposes no system. It is, above all, a pragmatic poem, essaying ideas and emotions, love, lust, lament, and grief. Topical issues are also a concern in some of the songs, including the deaths of such prominent figures as President John F. Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King. Death, particularly the suicide of Berryman’s father, is considered to overshadow this extended poem sequence.

Several of the finest poems are elegies for fellow poets— Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath—and certain key songs encompass Berry-man’s ambivalent feelings for his dead father.

”Always,” Kenneth Connelly has written, ”Henry stands above his ‘father’s grave with rage,’ resentful, com passionate, jealous, accusing, finally gaining the courage to spit upon it.” Through the persona of Henry, Berryman, as Wasserstrom, expresses it, ”synthesizes all fragments of the self [and] helps the self to mediate [and] accommodate” destructive emotions. The desire to transcend his undefined existence wears down into defeat in later sections of this sequence, until ”Henry hates the world. What the world to Henry did will not bear thought.” The despair deepens into rejection: ”This world is gradually becoming a place / where I do not care to be any more.” He broods upon death in all its forms and nightmare possibilities, including the frequent lamentations for other poets who have died recently, and who seem to share his dark view of the world.

Berryman’s Henry shares Whitman’s infinite expansiveness and inclusiveness, but while the ability to accept everything and not bring things to an end is a source of much power for Whitman’s poetic vision, it is another source of Henry’s anguish: he is in pain because the past will not let him go, because he cannot ignore what is happening and what has happened to him, and because he cannot forget. Whitman’s expansiveness led to a new poetic line, a new kind of singing, free from the restrictions of traditional prosody. Henry, on the other hand, can transform his hell into song only by electing a formal and altogether arbitrary verse pattern. If his songs were to expand with the grand, arching lines of Whitman’s verse, the pain would expand unbearably with them. It is only by keeping the poetic form constrained and tight that Henry is able to hold in his pain, survive it, and transform it into redemptive song. The Dream Songs, begun exactly a hundred years after the first edition of Leaves of Grass, is Berryman’s dark inversion of Whitman’s Song of Myself.

Works in Critical Context

Edwin Morgan stated of Berryman that ”no one conveys better the sheer mess of life, the failures and disappointments, betrayals and jealousies, lust and drunkenness, the endless nagging disjunction between ambition and reality. Much of the critical attention Berryman s work received in the 1980s focused on the literary and bio graphical sources of The Dream Songs, as well as its themes and motifs.

The Dream Songs

It is worth emphasizing the word heroic in Robert Lowell s claim that The Dream Songs is ”the single most heroic work in English poetry since the War, since Ezra Pounds Pisan Cantos. In fact, Berry-man purposely emulated the form of ancient epic poetry, and the sections of his songs that come closest to mirroring that form have consistently been singled out for the highest critical praise. Book 4, the opus posthumous sequence which occupies the middle section of the poem, is considered by many critics to be among the finest of the songs; Robert Lowell told Berryman he considered Book 4 ”the crown of your wonderful work, witty, heart breaking, all of a piece … one of the lovely things in our literature.”

A number of critics have objected to Berryman’s ”abuse” of syntax, the whirligig of his demotic and literary diction—Robert Lowell found himself ”rattled” by ”mannerisms”—and what Denis Donoghue has called his ”hotspur materials.” The writing of the songs was a mammoth undertaking, and constructed largely without thought for an overarching narrative, which has rubbed some critics the wrong way. The dissociated ”pieces,” as Denis Donoghue has explained, go to make up the whole of the man and his work: ”This is not Whitman’s way. Whitman’s aesthetic implies that the self is the sum of its experiences, not the sum of its dissociated fragments . . .” The highly individualistic nature of the fragmented pieces has also been singled out as a strength, as when Adrienne Rich noted ”the power of that identity to define its surroundings so accurately. . . . a truly original work, in the sense in which Berryman has made one, is superior in inner necessity and by the force of a unique human character.”

References

Kelly, R. J. John Berryman: A Checklist. Lanham, Md.:Scarecrow, 1972.
Kelly, Richard J. John Berryman’s Personal Library: A Catalogue. New York: Peter Lang, 1998.
Mariani, Paul L. Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996.
Vendler, Helen Hennessy. The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.