Let Us Not Let John Berryman Lapse Into Obscurity

The door closes on the centennial year of John Berryman's birth. At The Atlantic, Christopher Benfey considers how this kind of celebration has the potential to bury the poet. "What’s needed now, and urgently, before he disappears for good, along with Ted (Roethke), Randall (Jarrell), Richard (Blackmur), and Delmore (Schwartz), is a rigorous selection of Berryman’s best poetry and only his best, rather than well-meaning attempts to show his 'breadth,' his unsurprising political commitments, or the early stirrings of this or that tendency in his mature work," writes Benfey.

“Recently things have been rather quiet around Berryman,” the poet Michael Hofmann observes in his stylish introduction to The Dream Songs, the best of the four volumes of Berryman’s poetry that his longtime publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has issued to mark his 100th birthday. With the drift of years, many of the names of Berryman’s celebrated friends, rattled off confidently in lines that recall the accusatory opening of Howl, have lapsed into obscurity:

I’m cross with god who has wrecked this generation. First he seized Ted, then Richard, Randall, and now Delmore. In between he gorged on Sylvia Plath. That was a first rate haul. He left alive fools I could number like a kitchen knife but Lowell he did not touch.

One might say, as Berryman wrote in his gorgeous suite of poems for Delmore Schwartz, that he and his once lustrous contemporaries are still “waiting for fame to descend / with a scarlet mantle & tell us who we were.”

Berryman’s phrasing here echoes Mallarmé’s famous sonnet about Poe’s tomb, with its prediction that eternity would eventually “change” Poe back “into Himself,” separating the greatness of the poet’s achievement from the lurid legends that had come to surround him. While Berryman’s literary friends have faded, he has experienced a “curious afterlife” in the 21st century, as the young British critic Daniel Swift points out in his informative introduction to The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems. But signs are we may still be in his lurid moment. . . .

It gets quite thorough, noting that, while alcohol and adultery "are often thought to have been John Berryman’s muses," that "his real and abiding muse was American spoken English. 'I am a monoglot of English / (American version),' he proclaims in an early Dream Song." Read the full piece at The Atlantic.