shabby mummy flower. Note I keep safe,  Nothing, on a ration slip a social scrawl—  Not that it didn’t forth some pages call  Of my analysis, one grim paragraph.

There are enjoyable juxtapositions here. Outdated words such as “slake” and “cenotaph,” the oversweetness of “dawn-eyed envoy,” ranged about the all-too-contemporary simile, “welcome as Seconal,” are no accident. There is an irreverent literary mind at work here, orchestrating intentionally a little out of tune. It is harder to appreciate or justify a phrase such as “not that it didn’t forth some pages call/ Of my analysis.” Such syntax is a high price to pay for a rhyme, and much more extreme examples could be cited.

On the whole, the sequence is successful, but the seeds of Berryman’s eventual undoing are here. The confessional nature of the poems (Berryman did experience just such an affair in 1947, and required a good deal of psychoanalysis afterward) makes it plain enough why their publication was delayed so long, but it also leads the reader to wonder whether they should have been published at all. In his attempts to work within a fairly strict form, he shows a tendency to force rhyme and overburden meter. His literary name-dropping (“O if my syncrisis/ Teases you, briefer than Propertius’ in/ This paraphrase by Pound—to whom I owe three letters”), private allusions, and inside jokes present a dangerous intrusion of the idiosyncratic, the personal. With more shaping, more revision, more distance generally, the sequence could have been much more artistically successful than it is. Perhaps part of Berryman’s intention was to get the thing on paper “as it was,” to share his raw feelings with the reader. The best of the sonnets, by their wit and craft, speak against such a supposition. They contain, as a group, too much undigested Berryman to be placed, as some have placed them, beside the sonnets of William Shakespeare. Lise is all too actual, “barefoot . . . on the bare floor riveted to Bach,” no Dark Lady. Further, while Shakespeare’s sonnets have much to say about love, loss, youth, age, success, and failure, they tell the reader little if anything about William Shakespeare, while Berryman’s sonnets reveal more than one may care to know about Berryman.

Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

Not long after the strenuous summer of the sonnets, Berryman began a poem on the seventeenth century American Puritan poet, Anne Bradstreet. Part of the initial task was to find the right stanza for the job; an eight-line stanza suggested itself, the pattern of feet running 5-5-3-4-5-5-3-6, with a rhyme scheme of abcbddba. Neither meter nor rhyme is adhered to inflexibly in the resulting poem, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, but for the most part Berryman succeeded in his choice of a stanza “both flexible and grave, intense and quiet, able to deal with matter both high and low.” He achieves beautiful effects in the fifty-seven stanzas of this poem. The birth of Bradstreet’s first child after several years of barrenness is portrayed in images wonderfully right: “I press with horrible joy down/ my back cracks like a wrist.” The words sweep forward, charged with the urgency of this experience, “and it passes the wretched trap whelming and I am me/ drencht & powerful, I did it with my body!/ One proud tug greens Heaven. . . .” In fact, some of the most touching moments in the poem focus on Bradstreet and her children, whether the occasion be death, as in stanza 41, “Moonrise, and frightening hoots. ’Mother,/ how long will I be dead?’” or nothing more than a loose tooth, as in stanza 42: “When by me in the dusk my child sits down/ I am myself. Simon, if it’s that loose,/ let me wiggle it out./ You’ll get a bigger one there, & bite.” Moving outdoors, away from the hearth, there are lovely scenes of natural description: “Outside the New World winters in grand dark/ white air lashing high thro’ the virgin stands/ foxes down foxholes sigh. . . .”

Berryman, however, has his problems with the poem. As in the sonnets, he sometimes tangles his syntax unnecessarily: “So were ill/ many as one day we could have no sermons.” To write “so were ill many” instead of “so many were ill,” without even the excuse of a stubbornly kept rhyme scheme, seems at best eccentric, at worst, sloppy. As in the sonnets, also, there is an unfinished quality about the poem. Tangled phrasing, the inconsistent use of a rather carefully established rhyme scheme—these in spite of the fact that Berryman spent years on the poem, even blamed the demise of his first marriage partly on the intense effort that the work required. One may wonder, in spite of his long labors, whether he relinquished it to the public a bit unfinished.

The major flaw in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, however, has not so much to do with details of diction or prosody. Bradsteet was, by historical accounts, a happily married, deeply religious woman, devoted to her husband and children, who happened to write poetry. Berryman needed for his poem a passionately suffering artist, plagued by religious doubt, resentful of her husband and family, and thwarted in her dream of artistic commitment, so he altered the historical Bradstreet to suit his purposes. This reshaping of history is necessary for the centerpiece of the poem—a seduction scene between a modern poet and a woman three hundred years buried. In an understandably surrealistic dialogue, the poet speaks his love for the poor, tormented Bradstreet in a rather far-fetched variation of the designing rake’s “Let me take you away from all this.” Bradstreet (Berryman’s, that is) is tempted to religious doubt, to extramarital dalliance (she does ask the poet for a kiss), to despair over her misunderstood lot. Her domestic commitments, however, overrule her temptations, and the poem ends with the modern poet standing before Bradstreet’s grave and uttering words that are supposed to be touching and solemn, but which somehow fail to convince:

 I must pretend to leave you . . . O all your ages at the  mercy of my loves together lie at once, forever or so long as I happen. In the rain of pain & departure, still Love has no body and presides the sun . . . Hover, utter,  still a sourcing whom my lost candle like the firefly loves.

The rhyming of “still” with itself is a nice touch, and “the rain of pain & departure” rings true, but the passage has a disturbing, self-conscious quality that is not at all helped by a reference, in one of the closing stanzas, to contemporary (post-World War II) anxieties—“races murder, foxholes hold men,/reactor piles wage slow upon the wet brain rime.”

The foregoing summary oversimplifies and leaves much unsaid. In all fairness, there are many brilliant moments in Berryman’s poem, but, as a whole, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet is somewhat less than brilliant. John Frederick Nims, reviewing the poem in Prairie Schooner, termed it a “gallant failure,” finding it “magnificent and absurd, mature and adolescent, grave and hysterical, meticulous and slovenly.” In the end, his major complaint is that the poem,purportedly concerned with Anne Bradstreet . . . is really about “the poet” himself, his romantic and exacerbated personality, his sense of loneliness, his need for a mistress, confidante, confessor. One might think there would be more satisfactory candidates for the triple role among the living.

Nims’s position is persuasively put and strikes at the heart of what is wrong with Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Rather than conveying any true homage to this first American poet, Berryman lets his own personality, his own needs and concerns, dominate the stage, to the extent that the Bradstreet of his poem becomes just a version of himself. Far from “escaping personality,” to recall Eliot’s term, Berryman forces Bradstreet into the mold of his own personality.

The Dream Songs

From “Berryman” of the sonnets, to “the poet” of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, Berryman moved on to “Henry,” the narrator and protagonist of The Dream Songs, the sequence of 385 poems that is considered to be his major work. Berryman apparently began with the notion of writing another long poem, about as long as Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930). What resulted, however, was something closer to Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1925-1972). At the center of the poems is a character known variously as Henry House, Henry Cat, Pussycat, and Mr. Bones. Within flexibly formal songs of three sestets apiece, Berryman reveals Henry’s trials and sufferings, which in many cases are the reader’s as well. Too often, however, the songs are about Berryman.

There is real feeling in The Dream Songs. Too much suffering, however, spread not at all thinly over seven thousand lines and interspersed with proportionately more of the same sort of name-dropping and private allusion encountered in the sonnets, becomes oppressive and even boring. There are wonderful moments, notably in the elegies for dead friends—Jarrell, Schwartz, Sylvia Plath. The obsession with suicide that laces many of the poems is lent a special poignance when considered in the light of the suicides of Berryman’s father’s and Berryman himself. Not surprisingly, Henry’s father took his life when he was young. Still, readers must be very interested in Berryman as a person to wade through these 385 poems, for Berryman is once again the center of attention, the “star” of his own epic, despite his coy disclaimer that Henry is “not the poet, not me.”

In his continuing inability to distance himself sufficiently from his poetry, Berryman places the reader in an awkward position. In The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1939), C. S. Lewis describes the necessity of keeping one’s response to a poem separate from one’s response to the personality of the poet, a task that Berryman makes unfairly difficult. When readers mix the two, says Lewis, they offend both poet and poem. “Is there, in social life,” he asks, “a grosser incivility than that of thinking about the man who addresses us instead of thinking about what he says?” No, says Lewis, “We must go to books for that which books can give us—to be interested, delighted, or amused, to be made merry or to be made wise.” As for personalities, living or dead, the response should be some “species of love,” be it “veneration, pity,” or something in between.

Berryman’s personality is hard to love, easier to pity, but what is truly to be pitied is the fact that, had his skills as a poet been a match for his troubled personality, he would without question have been one of the greatest poets of his time.