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Authors: John Berryman
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first understand what she meant, but one of Berryman’s suicidepoems had spoken of him going in “under the water”:
Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
Floor of the harbour … I am everywhere,
I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move
With all that move me, under the water
Or whistling, I am not a little boy.
[“The Ball Poem”]
Berryman’s mother (who had changed her name from Martha to Jill at the request of her new husband) believed herson had slipped from the Minneapolis bridge and that it wasn’t a suicide. Forty-four years earlier, she hadn’t believed her husband’s death was a suicide either, though he’d shot himself in the chest outside their son’s bedroom window. She told her son that she’d removed all the bullets from the gun, which she’d kept around only “to frighten any thieves or rascals away.” All his life, Berryman feltguilt-ridden about his father’s death at the age of thirty-nine, and his poems often revisit the violent facts.
In his own interview for The Paris Review , Berryman explains that the Dream Songs are not “confessional poems.” He understands the confessional “to be a place where you go and talk with a priest,” and he hasn’t been to confession since he was twelve years old. He sees himself as anepic poet and the collected Dream Songs are a long poem—with the greatest American poem, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” as his model. It too has a hero, a personality, and a self, but Berryman doesn’t think his poem goes as far as Whitman’s. He calls “Song of Myself” a “wisdom work” about “the meaning of life and how to conduct it,” but according to him, “ The Dream Songs does not propose a newsystem; that is not the point.”
If in poetry the first person pronoun—the “I”—is not the poet, it is even less so in a Berryman Dream Song, where the speaker modulates immediately into Henry. And when it comes to Henry’s religious and political opinions, they might not even be Henry’s, since the poems are a transcript of his tragicomic nightmares. And since there is no structured plot to 77Dream Songs , it coheres as a work about the personality of Henry rather than as a continuous narrative. According to Berryman, all the way through his poetry there
is a tendency to regard the individual soul under stress. The soul is not oneself, for the personal ‘I’, one with a social security number and a bank account, never gets into the poems; they are all about a third person. I’m a followerof Pascal in the sense that I don’t know what the issue is, or how it is to be resolved—the issue of our common human life, yours, mine, your lady’s, everybody’s; but I do think that one way in which we can approach it, by the means of art, coming out of Homer and Virgil and down through Yeats and Eliot, is by investigating the individual human soul, or human mind.
Berryman believed that writingpoems was a vocation that demanded the attention of his whole being. His friend Saul Bellow said that he drew his writing “out of his vital organs, out of his very skin.” He spent thirteen years writing the Dream Songs and in them rejects the decorous Anglophilia and formal versification that were fashionable during the previous decade. “I set up The Dream Songs as hostile to every visible tendencyin both American and English poetry,” Berryman said. Instead, we get a new kind of diction—ridiculous, grotesque, horrible, delicious—that better suits the generally extravagant situations in which the sobbing protagonist Henry finds himself.
At a public reading, Robert Lowell described Berryman’s poems as being of a sort that people didn’t expect to see again. They are obscure, and they reviveobscurity at a time when people thought it was finished (though this assessment ignores a countertradition in American poetry that includes Black Mountain, the New York School, and the San Francisco Renaissance poets). “A lot of the
Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
Floor of the harbour … I am everywhere,
I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move
With all that move me, under the water
Or whistling, I am not a little boy.
[“The Ball Poem”]
Berryman’s mother (who had changed her name from Martha to Jill at the request of her new husband) believed herson had slipped from the Minneapolis bridge and that it wasn’t a suicide. Forty-four years earlier, she hadn’t believed her husband’s death was a suicide either, though he’d shot himself in the chest outside their son’s bedroom window. She told her son that she’d removed all the bullets from the gun, which she’d kept around only “to frighten any thieves or rascals away.” All his life, Berryman feltguilt-ridden about his father’s death at the age of thirty-nine, and his poems often revisit the violent facts.
In his own interview for The Paris Review , Berryman explains that the Dream Songs are not “confessional poems.” He understands the confessional “to be a place where you go and talk with a priest,” and he hasn’t been to confession since he was twelve years old. He sees himself as anepic poet and the collected Dream Songs are a long poem—with the greatest American poem, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” as his model. It too has a hero, a personality, and a self, but Berryman doesn’t think his poem goes as far as Whitman’s. He calls “Song of Myself” a “wisdom work” about “the meaning of life and how to conduct it,” but according to him, “ The Dream Songs does not propose a newsystem; that is not the point.”
If in poetry the first person pronoun—the “I”—is not the poet, it is even less so in a Berryman Dream Song, where the speaker modulates immediately into Henry. And when it comes to Henry’s religious and political opinions, they might not even be Henry’s, since the poems are a transcript of his tragicomic nightmares. And since there is no structured plot to 77Dream Songs , it coheres as a work about the personality of Henry rather than as a continuous narrative. According to Berryman, all the way through his poetry there
is a tendency to regard the individual soul under stress. The soul is not oneself, for the personal ‘I’, one with a social security number and a bank account, never gets into the poems; they are all about a third person. I’m a followerof Pascal in the sense that I don’t know what the issue is, or how it is to be resolved—the issue of our common human life, yours, mine, your lady’s, everybody’s; but I do think that one way in which we can approach it, by the means of art, coming out of Homer and Virgil and down through Yeats and Eliot, is by investigating the individual human soul, or human mind.
Berryman believed that writingpoems was a vocation that demanded the attention of his whole being. His friend Saul Bellow said that he drew his writing “out of his vital organs, out of his very skin.” He spent thirteen years writing the Dream Songs and in them rejects the decorous Anglophilia and formal versification that were fashionable during the previous decade. “I set up The Dream Songs as hostile to every visible tendencyin both American and English poetry,” Berryman said. Instead, we get a new kind of diction—ridiculous, grotesque, horrible, delicious—that better suits the generally extravagant situations in which the sobbing protagonist Henry finds himself.
At a public reading, Robert Lowell described Berryman’s poems as being of a sort that people didn’t expect to see again. They are obscure, and they reviveobscurity at a time when people thought it was finished (though this assessment ignores a countertradition in American poetry that includes Black Mountain, the New York School, and the San Francisco Renaissance poets). “A lot of the
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