558 The American Century: Literature since 1945Consequently, his story becomes history: he told true tales of his life which have,
in turn, become true tales for all of us.
“Really we had the same life,” Lowell wrote in his elegy for John Berryman
(1914–1972), “the generic one / our generation offered.” Lowell recognized in
Berryman a fellow explorer of dangerous psychological territory: “I feel I know
what you have worked through,” he declared, “you / know what I have worked
through ... / ... / John, we used the language as if we made it.” What is more, he
learned from Berryman: Notebook, he acknowledged, bore the imprint of Berryman’s
The Dream Songs (1969) – of which Lowell said, in an admiring review, “All is risk
and variety here. This great Pierrot’s universe is more tearful and funny than we can
easily bear.” But The Dream Songs was by no means Berryman’s first work: like
Lowell again, “cagey John” (as he was later to call himself ) began under the burden
of alien influences, particularly Yeats and Auden. “I didn’t so much as want to
resemble [Yeats] as to be him,” Berryman later admitted, “and for several fumbling
years I wrote ... with no voice of my own.” “Yeats ... saved me from the then crushing
influence of ... Pound and ... Eliot,” he added, “but he could not teach me to
sound like myself.” On the whole, his earlier poetry is constricted by its formal
quality, its attentiveness to established models. Berryman’s Sonnets, for instance,
written in the 1940s although not published until 1968, start from an intensely
personal base, an adulterous love affair the poet had with an unspecified woman.
But everything is distanced by the use of the strict Petrarchan form, archaic language,
and a conventional argument that leads us through love and loss to transference of
affection from woman to muse (“my lady came not / ... I sat down & wrote”). Only
now and then do we get glimpses of the vain, sad, drunken, lustful, comic, and
pathetic “I” that dominates and distinguishes the later work.
“I want a verse fresh as a bubble breaks,” Berryman declared in one of his sonnets;
and the fresh style came in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956), which the poet
called a “drowning” in the past. In this long poem of 57 stanzas, the “benevolent
phantom” of the seventeenth-century poet, Anne Bradstreet, is conjured from the
grave; she speaks, through the voice Berryman gives to her, of her emigration to
New England and her hard life there; in a moment of intense communion, at once
spiritual and erotic, the two poets from different centuries engage with each other;
then Bradstreet succumbs to the pull of the past, and she and Berryman are once
more imprisoned in their own times. “Narrative!” Berryman recalled himself
thinking while he was writing the poem, “Let’s have narrative ... and no
fragmentation!” Along with the fundamental coherence of narrative, he was also
aiming, he said, at poetic forms “at once flexible and grave, intense and quiet, able to
deal with matter both high and low.” He did not choose Anne Bradstreet, Berryman
claimed, she chose him; and she did so, “almost from the beginning, as a woman, not
much as a poetess.” It is not the author of “bald / abstract didactic rime” he
encounters, in other words, but a passionate rebel who resists the conventions of
youth and age, the restrictions of her environment and culture, the limitations of
her body and the apparent will of God. In each case, though, rebellion is followed by
surrender: “My heart rose,” as she puts it, “but I did submit.” This pattern of defianceGGray_c05.indd 558ray_c 05 .indd 558 8 8/1/2011 7:31:31 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 31 PM