In a natural way, John Berryman is oblique, private, elliptical. We seem to overhear him. Locked in a verbal spasm, he has trouble, often enough, in getting out or across, and an essential part of his performance is a rheumatism of the sensibility, in which the grammar is so knotted up that his poems evince the difficulty of getting them written at all. Beginning, he seems not quite to know what is nagging at him; finished, he has allowed into the poem various accidents, concomitants, and ricochets…. One of the most ego-ridden poets, he makes authoritative rhetoric out of the nervous tic, and an original voice as well. It is almost out of the question to confuse lines by Berryman with those of any other poet, though like a celebrant magpie he echoes dozens of poets from Pound and Stevens to Hopkins and Cummings. His "grammaticisms" alone would identify him, I suppose: his wrenchings or mutilations of grammar are not those of others. In fact, nearly everything about him is manneristic and, at times, he seems almost like an involuntary exercise in the manner of poet as idiosyncratic paradigm. A hard nut to crack, he is a poet fully qualified for exegesis and often badly in need of it.

My purpose here is … to consider certain tendencies in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and Delusions, Etc. There were times when Berryman verged on the metaphysical mind, although never sustainedly; it seems to have haunted him, the possibility of getting into such a frame of mind (and reference) flickers in his work like morganatic fire. It shows up in Dream Songs, I think, in the persona of intervening Mr. Bones, the death-figure who puts awkward questions at the wrong moments only to answer them himself in a weird combination of black lingo and uncouth blues. Henry, the poet figure whose interior biography the Songs jerkily reveal, owns Mr. Bones and, presumably, goes on owning him until Mr. Bones owns him, which is when the Songs end, as they did in 1972. But I don't think it would be right to regard Dream Songs as metaphysical … [their drift is social]…. The entire sequence is an almost spastic search for a self, and it's not a self blurred through transcendental overlap with rocks and stars and trees, it's a self blurred by its own chemistry. If Berryman reaches out in these short poems, it's to bring himself back, not to steal a magic from the universe at large. Psychologically of enormous interest,… they are actually a bit short—in voracious interest, in intuited vastness, in empathetic penetration—compared with certain other works…. (pp. 141-42)

Homage to Mistress Bradstreet is an imaginary portrait almost in the manner of Walter Pater; indeed, Berryman's real-life alias has more fictional range than does the invented, arbitrary one of Henry. The answer, I think, is that, down the track, there was something precise and vivid to aim at, whereas Henry is too much Berryman himself to have edges. The one poem is a monument, the other a potpourri of broken images. Not that Homage isn't a poem of voices; it is, and these include the poet's own…. In fact, vocally, it is a polyphonic tour de force, sometimes achieving the uncanny effect of what has been presented serially becoming simultaneous: the voice lingers in one's ear and overshoots the next voice that comes along. Most impressive of all, the rhythm of Anne Bradstreet's mind comes boldly through, not only from Berryman's study of her own Meditations and his occasional use of phrases from them (some of which she had culled from the Scriptures), but also from his almost involuntary impersonations, which leave her mental gait on the silent white space around the poem like an oral signature. Adroit, subtle, tight, Homage … is an astonishing feat of invasive homage; her mind breathes again and, courtesy of the later poet, makes new images galore…. My point is that, through grammar or "grammaticism," Berryman offers optional readings which, rather than providing us with alternative insights into Anne herself, multiply her world instead, attuning us to things she may not be aware of, but which the intruding poet has supervised. And the motion thus implied, on our part complied with, not only turns the duo Bradstreet-Berryman into the Marcus Aurelius of Massachusetts, but also provides the poem with almost supernatural auspices that … turn the whole thing ontological. (pp. 142-43)

[In the verse on childbirth Berryman accomplishes a vivid empathy. How] many male poets have gone so alertly, so keenly, to the core of a female experience? Pain, relish, and disgust come together here to make a shocking, though far from sensationalist whole. The odd thing, as so often in Berryman, is that the means to this effect feels also like the means to something bigger that looms just beyond the stanza's edge. It's not just a woman, a woman poet, it's a human being in a fit of being tweaked by body chemistry, if you like by the matrix of all human life. The apparatus, the cadences, the sheer drops, the psychodramatic speaking of the unspoken in response to the unspeakable, all betoken the sense of being put upon by the universe; only—this qualifier will reappear apropos of Berryman—he never quite takes it to the limit…. (p. 144)

[Further on, his poetry accomplishes an] iconography of panic, the physical equivalent of a pandemonium which Berryman excels at conveying without, however, getting quite past it into an imaginative survey of its sources…. If ever a poem sat on the edge of an abyss, Homage does: it teeters, wobbles, falls apart, invites some cosmic power to rend it further, rends itself, comes provisionally together again, and comes to a dead stop…. (pp. 144-45)

Berryman, in this long poem at least, [is] the master of the ceremonies of homelessness. Not at home in the universe, he isn't located anywhere else. Unable to sift from cosmic phenomena the one he wants (maybe a personal intervention in his life by a caring God?), he transcribes the froth of wanting. In other words, he uses Anne Bradstreet to delineate the bittersweet, thwarted transcendence of a non-believer who asks only: Why should all this emotional ferment lead to nowhere, have no point? He aspires to a metaphysical habit in almost purely emotional terms without the least reaching out into the cosmic evidence. (pp. 145-46)

Twenty years separate Delusions, Etc. from Homage. The imagery has widened out, especially the cosmic sort, from references to "the Local Group" (of galaxies, that is), the Hale reflector, Wolf-Rayet stars (which are extremely hot ones), to God as "Corpuscle-Donor," "pergalactic Intellect," and such novelties as collapsars and the expanding universe…. But the references come out of duty, not enthusiasm…. Agile, suave in the extreme …, full of cultural and historical allusions, the poems are monuments to a failed religious attitude. As much dares as entreaties, as much acts of defiance as calls for help, they more or less ask the Creator why the hell He hasn't come yet and gotten John Berryman, whose untidy, cussed, bad-mouth waiting is getting on John's overwrought nerves. In the wake of Auden's clinical and public-school "Sir," Berryman comes up with a miscellany of vocatives, from "Your Benevolence," "Thou hard," "Dear," to "You," "in-negligent Father," "Sway omnicompetent," and others; but, although he works dismally hard at his new-found vocation of convert-disciple-prodigal unbeliever—he only keeps running headlong into the old panic which no flip "Okay" is going to mitigate…. [Berryman is] a poet of unsignifying pain, whose yearning is as metaphysical as Herbert's, say, whose images are as dishevelled as those of Cowley and Carew, but whose mind just cannot shed ego and hitch an atomic or molecular or electromagnetic lift along one of the avenues of out. It is a sad spectacle, an even sadder sound, when he recites the physique of Angst. That is what he does from his beginning to his end and he has few competitors for his demoralized post. Perhaps no one else has done this narrow, yet inescapable thing quite so vividly, knowing that at the end of the line (end of the life-line) there is only sensuous escapism … or something unspeakably bleak…. (pp. 147-49)

Berryman may not have cut through to the x for unknown that he craved and coveted with all his being; the increasing scope of his references has more a look of trophy-hunting than that of awed immersion; he never achieved what a Newsweek reviewer incredibly gifted him with (an "austere, level voice … so quiet it's sometimes hard to hear him"!); but it is impossible not to recognize the gibbering convulsions of his need. I think of him as a naturally metaphysical spirit, but one unable to sense the wonder that accompanies what he thought the insult, the snub, behind the nomenclature, almost as if the Local Group … were something from which he'd been shut out. That is the least we can say about him, though; the best is that he somehow mustered the courage to face ontological precipices dared by only a few. (pp. 149-50)