Arts and Letters

The death of John Berryman by suicide on January 7, 1972, was a shocking event for many reasons other than the one that must be obvious. The chief of these for this audience is the loss to American letters, and indeed to world letters, of a brilliant poet who in his fifty-eighth year was well on his way to a position among his peers that would have given both him and them an enormous pleasure. For he was ambitious as well as brilliant, and latterly his books, coming close upon one another, and meeting in almost every case with sensational success, had brought him a joy that he made no effort to conceal. He was not vainglorious; he was simply and naturally proud of the eminence he had attained after a good many years of something less than that. I knew him well through all of those years, from the time he was a freshman in Columbia College to the time, not long before his death, when he wrote me from Minneapolis a characteristically sanguine letter about the work he said he had just realized now lay ahead of him: thirteen books to match the thirteen he had already published.

The thirteen new books would be both verse and prose, both poetry and scholarship. John had never ceased to think of himself as a scholar in the great field of Shakespeare—a "Dr. Dryasdust," as he put it in this letter—and there were other fields he was frantically impatient to explore. He admitted that he was frantic, just as he insisted at other times that he was no such thing. "There are three reasons, I believe," he said in this same letter, "for my never having finished anything important except the Sonnets, the Crane, the Bradstreet poem, and the Dream Songs. First is: some bone-laziness but mostly DOLDRUMS, proto-despair, great-poets-die-young or at least unfulfilled like Coleridge & Co., all that crap. Two: the opposite, fantastic hysterical labor, accumulation, proliferation…. The man I identify with is Housman, pedantic and remorseless (though with a lyric style far superior to mine), a really bifurcated personality—and I mean to deal with him some time…. Third is over-ambitiousness. Part of this is temperamental grandiosity but more of it—unless of course I am wrong—is legitimate self-demand on the largest conceivable scale."

So on and on, this all but infinitely energetic and excitable spirit whom those who knew him loved for a generosity to others that equalled the delight he took in his own career, actual or imagined. I have known few poets more lavish than he with praise for work altogether different from his own. He rejoiced in the successes of his friends, and he had many friends whom it pleased him to praise publicly. In a word, he was an overflowing man, a man who was never self-contained, a man who would have been multitudes had there been time and world enough for such a miracle.

His poetry, after a relatively mild beginning, first announced its full force in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, a poem in fifty-seven stanzas which he published in 1956, though it had appeared four years before that in Partisan Review. The strength in this poem was a weird thing, difficult to define: a muffled thing, as if it were struggling up through dense layers of resistance, but in the end a darkly musical thing which those who had ears to hear were captivated by; and the wrenching of idiom and syntax, the forcing of attention upon every word of the text, the putting of pressure upon the reader such as translations from great dead languages bring sometimes to bear, created a still deeper regard for the talent now so splendidly on display. Berryman's poetry, coming to maturity in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, was to go through further developments before his death, but no matter what the direction in which he moved, he continued as in the Bradstreet poem to search for styles that fitted his vision, and the fact is that he found them.

This was conspicuously the case with his famous Dream Songs, of which he finally published as many as three hundred and eighty-five: a large number, but it was justified because in the idiom he here discovered and used he was able to say all that he saw, thought, felt, imagined, and understood. In other words, he had broken through into his own deepest recesses, a region where few poets or writers of any kind ever come, and where he was free to be as witty, as serious, as ribald, as tender, as tough, as terrible, as downright funny as he pleased. To reread the Dream Songs is to recognize with rushes of pity how much went out of the world with their author. And this is not to speak of the other works, all of them comparable, each of them unique. The extent of our loss is still of course to be measured. It has only been hinted at here.