560 The American Century: Literature since 1945any notions of “ultimate structure” (although “assistant professors” will “become
associates” trying to find one, Berryman wryly observes), or any suggestion of a
stable, unitary self.
At one point in Dream Songs Berryman quotes Gottfried Benn: “We are using our
own skins for wallpaper and we cannot win.” Elsewhere, he refers to his verse as
“Henry’s pelt put on sundry walls.” Both remarks invite us to see the poem as raw
and immediate, made up out of pieces of the poet. The flow of the bloodstream
becomes a flow of language which, while the poet lasts, cannot stop: so the poem
ends, appropriately, on a note of anticipation – its last words, “my heavy daughter,”
looking forwards toward a future burdened with promise. It is worth emphasizing,
however, that the intimacy of these songs is the product of craft. The calculated use
of personae, a lively and varied idiom, a powerfully forced syntax and dense imagery,
and a fairly tight formal structure – all these things enable the poet to displace and
dramatize the play of feeling, translating the “data” that are “abundantly his” into
objective imaginative experience. The tragedy of most of Berryman’s last poems, in
Love & Fame (1970; revised edition 1972) and Delusions (1972), is that he forgot this.
“I wiped out all the disguises,” he said of these poems, “... the subject was ... solely
and simply myself.” Their tone varies from the brashly self-confident (“I make a high
salary & royalties & fees”) to the desperate (“I’m vomiting. / I broke down today in
the slow movement of K365”). There are some rather repellent litanies of sexual
conquests (“shagging with a rangy gay thin girl / (Miss Vaughan) I tore a section of
the draperies down”), statements of belief that range from the convincing (“Man is
a huddle of need”) to the banal (“Nobody knows anything”). And, as a whole, these
poems chart a progress from skirt-chasing and self-promotion to humble religious
faith (“I do not understand; but I believe”). The problem is that whether Berryman
is declaring “I fell in love with a girl, / O and a gash” or admitting “I fell in love
with you, Father,” the poetic result remains the same: the rhythms are lumpen,
the imagery thin, the idiom casual to the point of sloppiness. “I am not writing
autobiography-in-verse,” Berryman insists; unfortunately, he is at least trying to,
and very little is added to the meanings or measure of his autobiography by the use
of verse. This is not so much confessional poetry, in fact, as pure confession: moving,
sometimes, in the way that the confidences of any stranger might be, but not some-
thing in which we can share.
“I’ve been very excited by what is the new breakthrough that came with, say,
Robert Lowell’s Life Studies,” said Sylvia Plath (1932–1963). “This intense
breakthrough into very serious, very personal emotional experience, which I feel has
been partly taboo.” “Peculiar and private taboo subjects I feel have been explored in
recent American poetry,” she went on. “I think particularly of the poetess Anne
Sexton ... her poems are wonderfully craftsmanlike ... and yet they have a kind of
emotional and psychological depth which I think is something perhaps quite new
and exciting.” Plath’s excitement grew from a sense of kinship. Even her earlier
poems are marked by extremism of feeling and melodic cunningness of expression.
But it was in the poems published after Plath’s suicide, in Ariel (1966), that the
impulse toward oblivion, and the pain that generated that impulse, were rendered inGGray_c05.indd 560ray_c 05 .indd 560 8 8/1/2011 7:31:31 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 31 PM