Introduction



John Berryman saw birthdays as imaginative opportunities. Lecturing at Princeton in March 1951, he pictured Shakespeare on his thirtieth birthday. “Suppose with me a time, a place, a man who was waked, risen, washed, dressed, fed, congratulated, on a day in latter April long ago,” he began: “about April 22, say, of 1594, a Monday.” A birthday is a chance to greet across time: to hail a predecessor. In a late poem Berryman addressed Emily Dickinson. It is December 10, 1970, and in “Your Birthday in Wisconsin You Are 140” he raises his glass to her. “Well. Thursday afternoon, I’m in W——,” he writes: “drinking your ditties, and (dear) they are alive.” A birthday is a moment of invention. The climax of his long poem “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” is a violent, beautiful childbirth. “No. No. Yes! everything down / hardens I press with horrible joy down,” shouts Anne: “I did it with my body!” Close to the end of The Dream Songs, the cycle for which Berryman is best known, he writes: “Tomorrow is his birthday, makes you think.” John Berryman was born in McAlester, Oklahoma, on October 25, 1914, and this selection of his poems marks his centenary.

Bringing a man to life: this was his imaginative project. On March 12, 1969, collecting a prize at the National Book Awards, Berryman explained that his aim in The Dream Songs was “the reproduction or invention of the motions of a human personality, free and determined.” These poems describe a sad man called Henry. “So may be Henry was a human being,” he writes in Dream Song 13:

Let’s investigate that.

… We did; okay.

He is a human American man.

In producing him, they explore the conditions of his invention. “Let us suppose,” he begins, in Dream Song 15:

one pal unwinding from his labours in

one bar of Chicago,

and this did actual happen. This was so.

Just because we must imagine him does not mean that he is not real; nor is he exactly the same as Berryman. “The poem,” he asserts in a note, “is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry,” but the distance between the two remains a little blurred.

Berryman has not been canonized, quite; he has not continued to receive the respect, even awe, accorded to his great contemporaries Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. This may be because he appears a little less serious than they do. He is certainly funnier than they are, constantly mirthful about the process of critical celebration and literary canonization. “[L]iterature bores me, especially great literature,” complains Dream Song 14. “Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes / as bad as achilles,” it continues, and the joke is only half that Henry is no Achilles. It is also in the mismatch of classical literature and teenage ennui, balanced by the voice.

Berryman has, however, found a curious afterlife in the early decades of the twenty-first century. He appears unexpectedly and often in songs by indie rock bands. In “Mama, Won’t You Keep Them Castles in the Air and Burning?” by the band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the singer intones joylessly, “I came softly, slowly / Banging me metal drum / Like Berryman.” The Australian singer Nick Cave named one of his albums Henry’s Dream(1992), and in the song “We Call Upon the Author” from 2008 he returns to Berryman. “Berryman was the best!” he yelps: “He wrote like wet papier-mâché, went the Heming-way.”

These bands take Berryman as an emblem of the hard-living, misunderstood poet: it is a Romantic vision of the man and hinges upon his alcoholism, suffering, and early death. Berryman committed suicide by jumping from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis in January 1972, and this is the moment these songs return to. “There was that night that we thought John Berryman could fly,” sing the band The Hold Steady in “Stuck Between Stations,” and the song invents the scene. “The Devil and John Berryman, they took a walk together,” the song imagines, and it starts to speak for him: “He said, ‘I’ve surrounded myself with doctors and deep thinkers / Their big heads and soft bodies make for lousy lovers.’”

“John Allyn Smith Sails” by the band Okkervil River borrows Berryman’s original name and mixes his story with a classic pop song from the 1960s. The fortuitously named “Sloop John B” is in turn a pop cover of an old folk song, and this new version ends with Berryman’s voice:

I’m full in my heart and my head

And I want to go home

With a book in each hand

In the way I had planned

Well, I feel so broke up, I want to go home.

“With a book in each hand”: this is the final image of the first volume of Dream Songs, 77 Dream Songs, as a worn-down Henry determines to keep living:

with in each hand

one of his own mad books and all,

ancient fires for eyes, his head full

& his heart full, he’s making ready to move on.

Outside the confines of his own published works, Berryman’s words and image have moved into popular American myth, blended with the Faustian backstory of the blues—a singer who trades with the devil—and the old notion of the artist as troubled outsider. Like the Dream Songs, these indie rock bands are supposing a man, someone halfway between the invented and the real.

These are all, however, versions of Berryman’s life, and when we turn to the works they may at first look tied to a particular historical period. Berryman’s poems are filled with the bric-a-brac of 1950s and 1960s America:Ben Hur, Ike, the Viet Cong, and Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire. We hear of medicines and magazines of the time: LSD, Sparine, Haldol, and Serax; National Geographic and Time. His characters eat chicken paprika and drink frozen daiquiris, and speak lines from old vaudeville shows. Berryman loved blues music, and alludes to it throughout: Bessie Smith, Pinetop Perkins, “Empty Bed Blues” (“empty grows every bed” ends the first Dream Song). In “New Year’s Eve” from Berryman’s first full collection, The Dispossessed(1948), the speaker is at a party where “Somebody slapped / Somebody’s second wife somewhere,” and the line conjures an age perhaps best known to us now from TV shows. It is easy to read these poems as historical documents.

This is, however, too narrow an understanding of Berryman’s sense of history: for his listing of all these temporary possessions and fashions is also in the service of an ambition outside time. He wishes to capture what it is to be a human, alive and present in the culture. Reading Berryman therefore involves a little time travel, and this is the magic trick of deeply sympathetic literature: to exist in one instant both in the past and present, in two places at once. Berryman’s Sonnets trace the story of a love affair, and one of them describes an evening when Berryman and his lover are far from each other. They have agreed to each separately at six o’clock go to a bar. “I lift—lift you five States away your glass,” he explains, and although she has never been to this bar—“Wide of this bar you never graced”—and although there are other, ugly sounds and interruptions—“wet strange cars pass” and “The spruce barkeep sports a toupee alas”—they are for this moment with each other. “Grey eyes light! and we have our drink together,” it ends. Written before an age of cell phones, this event seems oddly archaic, sweet and old-fashioned. It is also magical, in its faith in will over circumstance, and it is what we do—in miniature—when we read. Berryman invites us to drink with him. In reading his poems, we clink glasses across the decades.

To celebrate Berryman on his one hundredth birthday, Farrar, Straus and Giroux have reissued his three major collections of poetry: Berryman’s Sonnets, 77 Dream Songs, and the complete cycle of 385 Dream Songs. Each has a new introduction by a poet: April Bernard, Henri Cole, and Michael Hofmann. In preparing this second edition of the New Selected volume, I have consulted with these three poets in choosing representative samples from both the sonnets and the Dream Songs, and I have tried to include those that show Berryman’s skill and style as a poet as well as those that are, simply, our favorites. But these three collections are not all of Berryman’s published poetry. This New Selected draws upon the whole of Berryman’s career. Here are poems from his first major collection, The Dispossessed (1948); the complete “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” (1953), which is his masterpiece, in the old-fashioned sense of the word—the early work that proves an apprentice is now a master of his chosen form; and from the moving two late collections, Love & Fame (1970) andDelusions, Etc. (1972). This volume also includes poems from the smaller collections published in Berryman’s lifetime, and for these I gratefully follow the texts established by Charles Thornbury in his John Berryman: Collected Poems 1937–1971 (1989), with the exceptions explained below. Thornbury includes only verse selected and arranged for publication by Berryman personally: he leaves out, for example, the poems written very late in Berryman’s life and collected after his death by John Haffenden in Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, 1967–1972(1977). I have included poems from this volume among the selection in order to give as broad a sample as possible.

In addition to Berryman’s poetry published as collections, this New Selected volume includes also a poem by Berryman that has not previously appeared among his published poetry. “Mr. Pou & the Alphabet” was published for the first time in Richard J. Kelley’s edition of Berryman’s letters to his mother, We Dream of Honour (1988), and is addressed to his son, Paul. Paul was born in March 1957, and the following year his second wife, Ann, left him, taking their son with her. Berryman remarried in the fall of 1961, and that Christmas he wrote “Mr. Pou & the Alphabet” for his separated son. It is an alphabet poem. It is tender and playful, but also a little somber. “A is for awful, which things are,” it begins. “B is for bear them, well as we can.” This is an older Berryman, one worn down by the world but still enduring, and one who loved his children, who are an important presence in his poetry. The final phrase of the Dream Songs is simply “my heavy daughter,” and among his papers at his death was the opening for a new long poem he hoped to write, on his three children and their futures.

Any selection implies an interpretation. Berryman has long been seen—and often dismissed—as a merely “confessional” poet, and while the urge to narrate his own collapses was certainly a motor for him, he is also a poet of many more voices than this. Confession, of course, has a religious origin, and Berryman was a powerful devotional poet. This New Selected includes his two cycles of liturgical verse, “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” and “Opus Dei,” in full. While he wrote these late in his career, the devotional impulse runs throughout his works. “What he has now to say is a long / wonder the world can bear & be,” he writes in the first Dream Song, and the struggle to make sense of an apparently cruel world is one strand among these astonishingly rich works. I have hoped, in my selection, to show Berryman’s development as a poet, which was a movement through styles and forms. This introduction traces some key concerns and motifs through his career.

* * *

On January 10, 1938, Berryman wrote to his mother. “The problem of the name has arisen again,” he explained, for he had just submitted poems to two little magazines under two different names, John McAlpin Berryman and J.A.M. Berryman. He had already decided to divide his writing life by name—John Berryman for poetry and plays, and J.A.M. Berryman for the rest—so his confusion was understandable. Now he feared it might deter readers. He was twenty-three years old, and planning for wide recognition.

The problem of the name arises only in part from Berryman’s great ambition; it is also a wholly sensible response to the deep uncertainty of his family structure. His childhood was a chaos of shifting names and uncertain relations. His mother called him Billy before he was born and until he was three, but he was christened John Allyn Smith, after his father. When his father died in June 1926—a suicide, it seems, although there is haze around even this—his mother soon remarried, this time to the family’s landlord, a man called John Angus McAlpin Berryman. It is customary for a woman to change her last name upon marriage, but Berryman’s mother changed her first name too. Martha Smith became Jill Angel Berryman and she renamed her son after his new father. The name John Berryman, then, is doubly borrowed, thirdhand. At school his friends nicknamed him Burrman, for he slurred his own name. Later, his first wife recalled him saying, “What I cannot forgive myself for not having done, was to take the name John Smith,” and in penance he repeated his actual name like a mantra or a curse.

He liked language that is particular to place. At school in Connecticut as a young teenager he collected slang: “hours,” “called up,” a “heeler.” He reported these to his mother, and when he arrived in England in 1936 he immediately wrote home to explain the local currency: “Sixpence is a tanner, the shilling a bob, the pound a quid.” He was on his way to Cambridge University, where he had been awarded a fellowship and where he dressed in tweed suits and changed his voice. He was twenty-one. “I suppose it is correct to say that I prefer their accent to the ‘American’ accent,” he wrote. For the rest of his life he followed English spelling both in private letters and his published work. W. S. Merwin was a student of Berryman’s at the University of Iowa in 1946, and he recalled his teacher’s voice: “[H]e snapped down his nose with an accent / I think he had affected in England.” Just as his voice was a copy, so too were his habits. In March 1937 Dylan Thomas visited Cambridge, and Berryman took up heavy drinking in imitation of the great Welsh alcoholic. In the summer of 1941 he was courting his wife-to-be in New York City, and one night they tried to find a restaurant for dinner. “How much easier it would be if we were abroad,” he told her: “Now, if we were in Paris, we could go to La Coupole.” He was imagining them as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, or himself as Hemingway, figures of another generation.

Reading Berryman’s early poetry is like playing a guessing game: who does he sound like now? He is Thomas here, and then he is Yeats; here he is Auden and here he is Eliot. It is by walking through this funhouse of mirrors and influences that he became himself. The very early “Winter Landscape” rewrites Dylan Thomas’s “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” as it imagines a “morning occasion”—not “mourning,” but the sound is the same, and he is sensitive to sound, this man of accents—and as it pictures

The long companions they can never reach,

The blue light, men with ladders, by the church

The sledge and shadow in the twilit street …

This follows Thomas:

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,

Robed in the long friends,

The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,

Secret by the unmourning water …

“Winter Landscape” was written in January 1939; in February 1940 he began “A Point of Age,” which turns oddly in the fourth stanza into Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter:

Odysseys I examine, bed on a board,

Heartbreak familiar as the heart is strange.

This becomes less unexpected when placed alongside the opening of Ezra Pound’s Canto I, which rewrites a scene from the Odyssey in that meter:

And then went down to the ship,

Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and

We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,

Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also

Heavy with weeping …

His titles echo others; he is borrowing his syntax and vocabulary; he is a young man, taking what is good, trying out what works. It is worth playing this footnote game now, for later, and culminating in The Dream Songs, Berryman will turn mimicry to his advantage and invent a poetics that is also an echo chamber. He will find a voice that is recognizably his own—perhaps the most distinctive voice of twentieth-century American poetry—but he will find it in the voices of others. To echo him: The heartbreak is familiar but the heart is strange.

In his first full collection, The Dispossessed (1948), he is often looking forward and anticipating what is ahead. “At twenty-five a man is on his way,” begins “A Point of Age,” and here he is fixated by the time of day and the time of life. “There was a kind of fever on the clock / That morning,” he writes in “Parting as Descent.” As poems about other poets and as poems about coming-of-age these are also, of course, poems about finding a place in the tradition. In “The Possessed” he pictures the dead before him:

This afternoon, discomfortable dead

Drift into doorways, lounge, across the bridge,

Whittling memory at the water’s edge,

And watch. This is what you inherited.

The poem follows the poetic vocabulary of T. S. Eliot and also the terms of his famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

This is the work of these early poems. Berryman is setting himself among the dead, counting up his inheritance.

There are also innovations, things particularly his, and since we know what Berryman became it is impossible now to read these early poems but with our own sense of anticipation; we know where he is going to get to and we wait for its first occurrence. Here are two early premonitions of the later Berryman. Berryman wrote “The Moon and the Night and the Men” on May 28, 1940, in Detroit. He was waiting for news from his girlfriend, who was in England; he had spent the winter alone in a freezing five-room apartment. This is a strange war poem, taking place at a distance from the war that had broken out six months before but which America would not join for almost another two years. The scene is an army base, somewhere in America, and it begins:

On the night of the Belgian surrender the moon rose

Late, a delayed moon, and a violent moon

For the English or the American beholder;

The French beholder. It was a cold night,

People put on their wraps, the troops were cold

No doubt, despite the calendar, no doubt

Numbers of refugees coughed, and the sight

Or sound of some killed others. A cold night.

A new confidence is shown in the handling of syntax, which here is a little twisted in order to open up and double the meanings. The delayed “no doubt” turns an observation of local conditions into a guess about what might be happening far out of sight. And slang here is important: “killing” takes both the demotic sense of making someone laugh and also something wholly more violent.

The second innovation is more striking, more severe. There are nine “Nervous Songs” in The Dispossessed, and they follow the same form of three six-line stanzas. Each takes a different voice: jagged, energetic, jumpy. “A Professor’s Song” is sung by a dusty, aggressive academic; “The Song of the Demented Priest” describes aging and an incipient loss of faith. “Young Woman’s Song” is anxious, taut, with something worried and sexual just beneath the lines. “I hate this something like a bobbing cork / Not going,” she says: “I want something to hang to.—” With this short cycle of poems, each in the same stanzaic form as the later Dream Songs, Berryman learned an important lesson: that the poem takes place between the lines. The young woman says, “What I am looking for (I am) may be / Happening in the gaps of what I know,” and this is true for Berryman’s own poetics, discovered through speaking like another.

It is conventional to describe Berryman as “confessional”: as one of a group of American poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including also Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, for whom the use of personal material was a special and distinguishing mark. In 1962, the English critic A. Alvarez celebrated what he saw as “a new seriousness” in these poets: “I would define this seriousness simply as the poet’s ability and willingness to face the full range of his experience with his full intelligence; not to take the easy exits of either the conventional response or choking incoherence.” This poetry would be open to all the experience of modern life, and particularly its grit: it would address suicide, depression, banality. This claim appeared in the introduction to a hugely popular anthology called The New Poetry, and Berryman was the first poet in it.

More recently, Adam Kirsch has suggested that our attention to the apparently intimate contents of the works of these poets has distracted us from their careful artifice. “To treat their poems mainly as documents of personal experience is not just to diminish their achievement, but to ignore their unanimous disdain for the idea of confessional poetry,” Kirsch writes in The Wounded Surgeon (2005):

Plath scorned the idea of poetry as “some kind of therapeutic public purge or excretion”; Berryman insisted that “the speaker [of a poem] can never be the actual writer,” that there is always “an abyss between [the poet’s] person and his persona”; Bishop deplored the trend toward “more and more anguish and less and less poetry”; Lowell explained that even in Life Studies, usually considered the first masterpiece of confessional poetry, “the whole balance of the poem was something invented.”

The tenacity of the term “confessional” lies partly in a way of reading: we feel that the real biographical experience gives the poem weight, and yet this is also, of course, a deliberate literary effect. Particularly in Berryman, there is a careful balance of new freedom and old form. That which is hidden is set against that which is displayed, as if each poem were half a secret.

Berryman was highly sensitive to form. In 1932, William Carlos Williams instructed his generation:

Don’t write sonnets. The line is dead, unsuited to the language. Everything that can ever be said from now until doomsday in the sonnet form has been better said in twelfth-century Italian.

Berryman’s whole career might be understood as a rebuke to this. In 1934, he wrote his first surviving poems: they are four Shakespearean sonnets, and they celebrate his mother’s fortieth birthday. The following year he tried to seduce a Barnard student by writing sonnets for her, and when in February 1947 he began an affair with a married woman he met in Princeton, he turned again to this form. “I wanted a familiar form in which to putthe new,” he wrote in his journal: “Clearly a sonnet sequence. And this gave me also a wonderful to me sense of continuity with lovers dead.”

Her name was Chris. The poems insist upon this: they are little boasts. He describes her blond hair and her clothes, her naked body as she sleeps. “You, Chris, contrite I never thought to see,” begins one: “Whom nothing fazes, no crise can disconcert, / Who calm cross crises all year.” He repeats the name in puns: he favors words such as “crisis” and “syncrisis.” He lists the days upon which they met—July 3, July 4—and he wishes to invent a new poetic language to express their specific love.

I prod our English: cough me up a word,

Slip me an epithet will justify

My daring fondle …

he writes, as if the language itself were complicit in their affair. In sonnet 23 he turns upon the traditional vocabulary and image-set of love poetry:

Also I fox ‘heart’, striking a modern breast

Hollow as a drum, and ‘beauty’ I taboo;

I want a verse fresh as a bubble breaks,

As little false …

He is trying to remake the familiar form so that it may hold the new.

Yet perhaps the problem is precisely that these sonnets have what Berryman called “a sense of continuity.” Like the emotions, these poems are deeply referential: Berryman mentions or alludes to Marlowe, Petrarch, Wyatt, Sidney, Hölderlin, Donne, the canon of love poets. They suffer the sadness of comparison. “Could our incredible marriage . . like all others’ . .?” trails off one of the sonnets, as if understanding that this is only one more love affair in a historical sequence of lovers and their sonnets, of passions bound by time. The poems are aware of the world around them. Both lovers were married to other people, and while Berryman considered submitting a few of them to magazines under the pseudonym Alan Fury, he withheld them from publication. Twenty years later, after he had found success—77 Dream Songs was published in 1964 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry—he returned to these sonnets and edited them for publication. He replaced the repeated name “Chris” with the almost rhyming “Lise,” presumably to disguise his lover’s identity, but what is most odd about this—and what reveals most about Berryman’s deep ambivalence toward the question of confession—is that having begun to erase the traces of her identity, he only went halfway. He changed her name but not the elaborate system of puns and echoes built upon that name. The eighteenth sonnet, for example, now addresses: “You, Lise, contriteI never thought to see, / Whom nothing fazes, no crise can disconcert.” He retains sonnet 87, which is an acrostic: the first letter of each line spells out “I CHRIS AND I JOHN.” This is a halfhearted discretion, as if he wanted to be caught. This is the poetic equivalent of the married man who leaves his lover’s lipstick on his collar.

How does the poet stand in relation to his subject? What does he owe, and what is his duty? These are the questions behind confessional poetry, and they are the questions that Berryman is working out. In late March 1948 Berryman wrote the first two stanzas of a new, long poem. It opens with a question as the poet directly addresses his subject:

The Governor your husband lived so long

moved you not, restless, waiting for him?

Anne Bradstreet is sometimes described as the first American poet. She arrived in New England in 1630 and her first volume of verse was published in 1650. Berryman calls to her across the centuries:

Out of maize & air

your body’s made, and moves. I summon, see,

from the centuries it.

I think you won’t stay

he fears, but she comes to him. In the fifth stanza, her voice begins to take over. “By the week we landed we were, most, used up,” she recounts, and tells him of her life, her early days in the New World, the first winters, and—in a rightly celebrated passage—the birth of her first child:

One proud tug greens Heaven. Marvellous,

unforbidding Majesty.

Swell, imperious bells. I fly.

Soon, she will not remain confined to history. The poet speaks to her, and she replies, flirting with him: “You must not love me, but”—she pauses—“I do not bid you cease.”

“Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” remains a startlingly bold poem, even today. It jumbles time, wrong-footing the reader with its inverted syntax and strange ellipses. Anne Bradstreet sees the ship on which they came to the New World rotting:

The Lady Arbella dying—

dyings—at which my heart rose, but I did submit.

History is overwhelming the present here. She asks him, “Sing a concord of our thought,” and Berryman replies: “I am drowning in this past.” He goes on to describe a strange vision, a nightmare of guilt:

I trundle the bodies, on the iron bars,

over that fire backward & forth; they burn;

bits fall. I wonder if

I killed them.

She replies: “Dreams! You are good.”

* * *

The first of the Dream Songs begins:

Huffy Henry hid the day,

unappeasable Henry sulked.

I see his point,—a trying to put things over.

The pieces come from elsewhere, but their density is new. A slang expression and a strange name; two characters, at least one of which is mysterious; meter jumping between iambs and trochees and a fluid, unusual syntax. The gap in the first line appears to convert an intransitive into a transitive verb, although of course it doesn’t; rather, it only thwarts our expectation of reliable, decipherable grammar. What is Henry hiding? Or where? Perhaps he’s hiding (something) inside that space in the line. We move from past to present tense, and by the second half of the third line the pronouns have dissolved.

In October 1954, Berryman moved to Minneapolis, to an apartment near a lake, and in the winter when it froze he liked to walk out on the ice. He began to keep a journal of his dreams. By the summer, he had 650 pages of dream analysis. In June 1955, he signed a contract for two books with Farrar, Straus & Cudahy. The first wasHomage to Mistress Bradstreet, which was published in October 1956; the second was a biography of Shakespeare. Berryman never finished this book. Instead, he began writing what he called from the start “dream songs,” which he did almost exclusively for the next fifteen years, at the rate of sometimes two a day. It is worth taking a short detour into the book that Berryman did not write to understand the ones he did.

Berryman began working on Shakespeare in early 1937, in Cambridge. Specifically, he was interested in the textual states and chronology of the plays, which is a dry subfield of literary criticism but which he found enthralling. In February 1937 he wrote: “It’s awfully silly ever to do anything but read Shakespeare,” and this might sound like only a young snob’s boast, but he seems to have meant it. In May 1944 he won a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, for Shakespeare textual study; he worked by night in a small basement office in the Princeton University library, and when it was locked he climbed in and out through a window. In 1952 he was awarded a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation “for the critical study of Shakespeare,” and in 1958 he claimed to have settled the date of Shakespeare’s early play The Two Gentlemen of Verona: “It is late 1592—early 1593 and I can prove it.” In 1964 he won another grant, to complete the book that was now called “Shakespeare’s Friend,” and he went to Washington to do research but spent all his time in bars. In 1969, on leaving a rehabilitation clinic: “A few months ought to see my biography at 500–600 pages.” In February 1970 he wrote a short lyric: “I’m hot these 20 yrs. on his collaborator / in The Taming of the Shrew.” In May 1970, on entering a treatment program for alcoholism, he made a list of “replacements for drinking,” and the first item was: “work on my Shakespeare biography mornings & afternoons.” In June 1971, he applied for and won a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, for work on the book that was now called “Shakespeare’s Reality.” On 17 December of that year, he wrote a note: “I thought new disappointments impossible but last night suddenly doubted if I really have a book ‘Shakespeare’s Reality’ at all, despite all these years.”

His life—it is not glamorous to say so—was a parade of grants and fellowships. When he was in trouble, the academic world came to rescue him. On his return from Cambridge, he taught in the English department at Wayne University in Michigan, and was hired by Harvard in 1940. He moved on to Princeton in 1943, where he taught creative writing. He lectured at the University of Cincinnati in 1952 and taught briefly at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa in 1954, and in 1955 he became a lecturer in humanities at the University of Minnesota. These universities provided the financial support that enabled him to become a poet, and something more than this. His biographer John Haffenden quotes one of Berryman’s students at Princeton, who remembered Berryman wearing a long striped scarf and reading a book while he walked across campus. “He seemed above all things donnish,” said the student: “I remember someone saying nobody ever looked so much a poet.”

He was “donnish,” like a don, and he looked like a poet: the universities gave Berryman a role to play and to play against. The Dream Songs is the product of this close, bookish world: the poems are specific on the protocols and hierarchies of academic life. “Hey, out there!” begins one:

assistant professors, full,

associates,—instructors—others—any—

I have a sing to shay.

We are assembled here in the capital

city for Dull—and one professor’s wife is Mary—

at Christmastide, hey!

This dream song has the title “MLA,” which is the annual conference of English departments in U.S. universities. The members of the Modern Language Association meet just after Christmas each year, and they jostle for status and jobs; assistant professors seek to rise in rank to associate professors. Later, in Dream Song 373, he returns to the joke as he imagines the scholars who will study him after his death:

will they set up a tumult in his praise

will assistant professors become associates

by working on his works?

He mocks the things he knows and loves.

John Haffenden’s painstaking 1999 collection of Berryman’s various academic writings on Shakespeare reveals much about the poet. His early work on textual states was built upon his assumption that the differing texts of Shakespeare’s plays are different because they have been reconstructed by the actors who first appeared in them, and once we think of these as people’s voices rather than texts, then we might be able to retrieve the original. As he wrote in February 1946: “One must emend through the error to the copy, and through that to the actor, hoping to reach Shakespeare.” For Berryman, textual scholarship was an art of hearing human voices. Later, he became obsessed with tracking down Shakespeare’s collaborators and coauthors, and after this he sought to write a biography: describing himself as “sick of quarter-Shakespeares,” he wanted to tell the whole story of the man. He is always seeking people, and when he came to interpret the plays he found them to be testaments of intimate experience. “Shakespeare was a man whose son died, who was publicly ridiculed and insulted, who followed a degrading occupation,” he wrote: “He wrote many personal poems about some of these things.” In a superb lecture called “The Crisis,” Berryman speculated that Shakespeare in early middle age suffered a nervous collapse, and he traces the symptoms through several plays, particularly Hamlet. Berryman read Shakespeare as the original confessional poet.

Shakespeare gave Berryman an image of what a poet might be; he taught him also how to sound. In a moving elegy published in The New York Review of Books, Robert Lowell recalled a summer day spent with Berryman: “John could quote with vibrance to all lengths, even prose, even late Shakespeare, to show me what could be done with disrupted and mended syntax. This was the start of his real style.” Shakespeare’s late plays are marked by a thickening of language as images pile upon one another and nouns are switched with verbs, and the sense is hard to follow. As a single example, here is the description of a swimmer from The Tempest:

his bold head

’Bove the contentious waves he kept, and oared

Himself with his good arms in lusty stroke

To th’ shore, that o’er his wave-worn basis bowed,

As stooping to relieve him.

The convoluted phrasing of the Dream Songs follows this as Berryman defers the subject from each description; his songs are often tiny plays, with two speakers, dialogue, and heightened dramatic tension.

He borrows words and phrases, too, particularly from the tragedies. Dream Song 91 begins, “Noises from underground made gibber some,” and this follows Hamlet as Horatio describes a night in ancient Rome when “[t]he graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.” In Dream Song 48 Henry is “Cawdor-uneasy, disambitious,” and he is recalling Macbeth; in 49, Berryman’s question, “How come he sleeps & sleeps and sleeps, waking like death: / locate the restorations of which we hear / as of profound sleep,” follows the play’s famous account of sleep as “[t]he death of each day’s life … Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course.” The imagery of King Lear runs throughout the Dream Songs, from the “Thumbs into eyes” that Henry fears in 226 to the haunting question “Who’s king these nights?” in 85. When Henry suffers from a “brain on fire” he is also Lear, “bound / Upon a wheel of fire,” and even more directly Berryman notes, “‘O get up & go in’ / somewhere once I heard,” which is an almost-quotation from the play. The examples continue; Berryman’s poetry awaits the fully annotated scholarly edition he would have loved. I suggested earlier that Berryman never completed his book on Shakespeare, but this is of course untrue. John Berryman finished a great work of Shakespeare scholarship and criticism. It is called The Dream Songs.

The gorgeous convolution of late Shakespeare is certainly one source of the Dream Song style; a second is closer to home. Writing in The Harvard Advocate in the spring of 1969, Adrienne Rich declared, “A new language is evolving in the heads of some Americans who use English.” Where other countries have “the security of a native tongue, of a Dictionary,” Americans must improvise their own language out of the basic elements of another. The American language is

this mad amalgam of ballad-idiom (ours via Appalachia), Shakespeherian rag, Gerard Manley Hopkins in a delirium of syntactical reversals, nigger-talk, blues talk, hip-talk engendered from both, Miltonic diction, Calypso, bureaucratiana, pure blurted Anglo-Saxon.

Only two men, Rich concludes, understand exactly what this language is: Bob Dylan and John Berryman. Both changed their names; both found long-worked-for success in 1965, which was the year that Dylan famously went electric and that Berryman won a Pulitzer for 77 Dream Songs. Both created by theft, by allusion and borrowing, and both wrote songs.

In Cambridge in 1936, Berryman was carefully listening to voices. He was surrounded by English voices, which he sometimes found hard to follow. “The rhythms of speech are very different,” he wrote to his mother not long after he had arrived: “Unless I attend very closely, I sometimes fail to understand several sentences at a time.” He was also paying new attention to the few American accents he heard. They were unusual, like rare flowers, and distance may make the familiar strange. He was reading, he went on, H. L. Mencken’s book The American Language: the fourth edition had just been published, and he described it as “really an extraordinary job, and a very good thing to be reading when I hear the island varieties of English so continually.” What he hears his Cambridge classmates speaking is not proper English, that is, but one dialect of it: one of the “island varieties.” This is in miniature the argument of Mencken’s combative and sprawling book. The American language is, for Mencken, marked by three characteristics. It is uniform, across the country; it is impatient with the rules of grammar; and it likes to borrow and to invent words. The first colonists needed new words for the things they had never seen before, so they borrowed “moose,” “skunk,” and “raccoon” from the Native Americans, and for the same reason they took words from Spanish. Mencken gives the example of “cockroach.”

Mencken quotes a 1914 study of the grammar used by students at twelve schools in Kansas City. “Its examination threw a brilliant light upon the speech actually employed by children near the end of their schooling in a typical American city,” he notes; this is the American language captured in the year of Berryman’s birth, and the study’s list of common errors reads now like a taxonomy of Dream Song style. The writings of these high school students displayed syntactical redundancy; there was incorrect use of mood, and a confusion of tenses; they misused comparatives and superlatives, and exchanged adjectives for adverbs. The verb often failed to agree with its subject, both in number and in person, and the pronoun often failed to correspond to its noun. “The chief grammatical peculiarities of spoken American lie … among the verbs and pronouns,” Mencken summarizes, and it is precisely these uses of verbs and pronouns “which set off the Common speech very sharply from both correct English and correct American.” Pronouns tell us who is speaking and what is spoken of; verbs clarify the actions taking place; in that first Dream Song we are told, “What he has now to say is a long / wonder the world can bear & be.” The sense is clear but the grammar is not. Berryman, who spoke with an English accent, wrote the Dream Songs in American.

This study of schoolchildren thinks in terms of errors, but Mencken does not share this prejudice, nor does Berryman: for both, a break in proper grammar is an opportunity, not a fault. In 1950, Berryman published a study of Stephen Crane; the book reads as closer to autobiography than biography, for Berryman seems to be writing as much about himself as his subject. Here he defines a writer as “a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right,” and here he considers Crane’s wayward grammar, particularly in his famous novel The Red Badge of Courage. “Crane’s grammatical sins consist mostly of difficulty in agreement, in reference, and in word order,” he writes, and observes that this at times leads Crane to “a gruesome awkwardness.” However: “This writer does not aim, as a rule, at smoothness, and of his oddest sentences some seem calculated.” He adds, as a rationale for this careful and creative abuse of the rules of grammar, one final proof: Of all writers, Shakespeare’s grammar “was flexible.”

The Dream Songs blur tenses, places, and people; they are not smooth. “A shallow lake, with many waterbirds,” begins Dream Song 101, and beneath the line is the footstep of iambic pentameter, Shakespeare’s meter; the rest of the poem does not conform to this, but it is established here at the start and then recalled, like a ghost, throughout. We are at a lake: it is unusual for a Dream Song to begin with such a simple setting and soon it takes back even this. “I was showing Mother around, / An extraordinary vivid dream,” it goes on, and the line break switches the meaning. The speaker was showing his mother around the lake in his dream; the speaker was showing his dream to his mother.

In the fourth line three more characters appear: “Betty & Douglas, and Don.” “He showed me around,” adds the speaker in an attempt at clarification, but now we are in a tangle of dreams and characters. A policeman arrives: “I askt if he ever saw / the inmates.” There was some trouble—“Don was late home”—but the poem refuses to explain. “I can’t go into the meaning of the dream,” the speaker says, “except to say a sense of total LOSS / afflicted me thereof,” and we are back in a loose iambic pentameter. The poem’s informality of subject and association dances against a hard poetic formality. This is something like what Shakespearean American might be: a possible language for poetry, traditional and innovative, rich and strange.

* * *

In the end, John Berryman did two things, and in so doing he summarized two great themes of his life’s work. These are a gift to his biographers and biographically minded interpreters, for they put a neat and legible stop upon the fluid, misunderstanding-filled story of his life. They make it all look inevitable in retrospect. In Berryman’s last collections of poems—Love & Fame (1970), and the posthumously published Delusions, Etc.(1972)—along with his uncollected late poems, we can feel the poet sorting and arranging the materials of his unsettled life.

First he looked back. Love & Fame and Delusions, Etc. set out a verse autobiography as Berryman ranges over his time and his memories of what had made him.

I fell in love with a girl.

O and a gash.

I’ll bet she now has seven lousy children.

(I’ve three myself, one being off the record.)

So begins Love & Fame, and the poems here are in loose quatrains, sometimes casually rhymed, informal and powerful. They consider Berryman’s young romantic and sexual entanglements, and his longing to be a poet. Often the desire for girls and the desire for literary fame are joined. “Images of Elspeth” begins:

O when I grunted, over lines and her,

my Muse a nymphet & my girl with men

older, of money, continually

lawyers & so, myself a flat-broke Junior.

This collection displays what Berryman calls in that same poem “a sense of humour / fatal to bardic pretension.” He acknowledges his youthful absurdity. In another he recalls of his earliest poetry: “I wrote mostly about death.” Blessed by wryness, the older man looks back, with affection, upon who he once was.

Berryman had of course done this before. In 1966, deciding to publish the cycle of sonnets he had written twenty years earlier, he looked back upon his previous self. In a poem added to the cycle at the time of publication, he describes writing these sonnets: “He made, a thousand years ago, a-many songs / for an Excellent lady, wif whom he was in wuv.” The childish spelling and past tense distance the younger man; twenty years become a thousand. In the autobiographical poems from Love & Fame and Delusions, Etc. he is warmer toward the younger man. What is perhaps most striking about these late poems is that he is writing the voice of his earlier self even while that younger self is—as an apprentice Great Poet—trying to work out what his voice is going to sound like. It is a switchback trick of sympathetic recall and a careful balancing act. He was hopeful and a little ridiculous, back when he was setting out. In “Two Organs,” he recalls:

I didn’t want my next poem to be exactly like Yeats

or exactly like Auden

since in that case where the hell was I?

But of course he learned by imitation; those italics lightly spoof his wish for originality.

It might be tempting to read these late poems as the moment Berryman at last became a confessional poet. He narrates his studies in Cambridge and his return to the United States. He finds success, has affairs and a first breakdown. He is increasingly explicit, about both sex and his life; he includes his home address in Minneapolis in one poem. But he warns: “I am not writing an autobiography-in-verse, my friends,” and we may see these poems in two slightly different contexts. Berryman was first admitted to the hospital for alcoholism in 1959, and for the rest of his life he was regularly in treatment: most often at the Abbott Hospital in Minneapolis, where he wrote many Dream Songs (“I prop on the costly bed & dream of my wife”), and the Intensive Alcohol Treatment Center at St. Mary’s Hospital in the same city. In 1970 he joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Their Twelve Steps of recovery insist upon self-evaluation. At Step Four, patients “[m]ade a searching and fearless inventory of ourselves,” and at Step Five “[a]dmitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.” These are also exercises for a writer: during 1971, as he was writing these last poems, Berryman was simultaneously at work on a novel—about a man undergoing treatment for alcoholism—calledRecovery. The novel, while unfinished, is structured upon the steps of treatment.

He was not thinking only of the shape of his own life, however. In his late poems Berryman turned to writing the lives of others, poets and artists, historical figures he admired. Delusions, Etc. includes a memorial poem for Dylan Thomas and the birthday song for Emily Dickinson; he wrote a biographical sketch of George Washington in seven fragments and a cycle of mostly quatrains in which he addresses Beethoven. He describes Beethoven’s famous late style: “Straightforward staves, dark bars, / late motions toward the illegible.” In these last works—his own late style—Berryman is again experimenting with how to plot a life in poetry. Among the unpublished works collected by John Haffenden in the posthumous Henry’s Fate is a poem in which Berryman describes Che Guevara as an almost holy, Christlike figure. “I’m screwed if I’ll praise you,” he declares to him: “you open a hope / we’re not contemptible necessity.”

Second, he embraced the end. His last two collections each include a cycle of devotional verse: “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” and the moving “Opus Dei,” which is composed of nine poems following the order of Latin liturgical hours. Like all devotional verse—and Berryman here sounds at times like George Herbert, perhaps the greatest devotional poet of all—these poems contemplate the limits of the self, and human life. Again, this embrace of a higher power is one central strand in the practice established by Alcoholics Anonymous: Step Two instructs, “Believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity,” and the final step only comes once the patient has undergone “a spiritual awakening.” Like recovery, devotion is the art of imagining what might come next, outside this known world.

* * *

This is a new poetic. Here, he is turning away from the self. In “Matins”:

However, lo, across what wilderness

in vincible ignorance past forty years

lost to (as now I see) Your sorrowing

I strayed abhorrent, blazing with my Self.

Here, he is trying to submit. In “Nones”:

I am olding & ignorant, and the work is great,

daylight is long, will ever I be done,

for the work is not for man, but the Lord God.

Now I have prepared with all my might for it

The drama and the tension—the beauty—of these late poems is that of a man torn between the fascinations of the self and the chance of a greater order. He is never wholly convinced. He is at best a “pseudo-monk,” as he calls himself in “Terce,” but the cycle of prayers enacts a drama of submission. This is not easy. It ends: “This fireless house / lies down at Your disposal as usual! Amen!”

On the morning of Friday, January 7, 1972, Berryman took the bus from his home to the university, but instead of going to his office he walked onto the Washington Avenue Bridge. He climbed over the railing, and then—according to one witness—waved goodbye before jumping. His body landed on the embankment of the west side of the Mississippi River. This great poet of shifting personalities could only be identified by the blank check in his pocket and his glasses, which had his name on the frame.

There is a strong temptation to read Berryman’s life as tragic, to see in it a parable of art and suffering. His biographers and critics find it hard to resist this precisely because Berryman himself leads them to it. In 1955, he wrote a fragmentary memoir of his school days, and he called it “It Hurts to Learn Anything”: throughout his life he repeatedly expressed his belief in a kind of equation of suffering and creativity. In 1965, when asked by a newspaper interviewer about the elements of good poetry, he replied: “Imagination, love, intellect—and pain. Yes, you’ve got to know pain.” He repeated this in his interview with The Paris Review, which was carried out in the fall of 1970. There, he said: “The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him.” This is a Romantic idea, of authority won by hurt, and poetry as dark knowledge, and it is bound up with Berryman’s own brooding upon his death. In a poem from the late 1950s called “The Poet’s Final Instructions,” he explains his wishes for his funeral: “Bury me in a hole, and give a cheer, / near Cedar on Lake Street, where the used cars live.” In his suicide, Berryman seemed to write a fit conclusion to this version of his life.

I don’t want to leave him like this, however, as a poet of retrospect and endings, as an artist of the grave. This misses something his writing life powerfully was: a joy of voices, antic and alive. There is the tragic urge, but there is also its counter: the pull toward life. In a very late Dream Song—written, according to his biographer Paul Mariani, in 1969, after the publication of His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which completes the Dream Songs—Berryman considered this divided sense:

A human personality, that’s impossible.

The lines of nature & of will, that’s impossible.

I give the whole thing up.

His larger project, across his life, was the attempt to capture in verse “a human personality,” and the challenge remained daunting. But then he turns before the poem finishes:

Only there resides a living voice

which if we can make we make it out of choice

not giving the whole thing up.

—Daniel Swift



Copyright © 2014, 2016 by Kathleen Berryman Donahue