You Can Never Be Sure

If you had to name the genre of The Selected Letters of John Berryman, how many different answers could you give? This essay considers a handful of approaches to reading poets’ correspondence and to the particularly disordered case of Berryman’s letters. After reading the letters the predominant way we approach modern poets’ correspondence today—as an assemblage of documentary evidence that stands alongside but not in place of a biography—this essay proposes a fruitful alternative: to focus less on their sender and more on their addressees. In that broader light, The Selected Letters is the best book ever assembled on what John Berryman needed from, and could provide for, anyone who wasn’t John Berryman. The remainder of the essay surveys what Berryman offered several generations of poets, from peers like Elizabeth Bishop, to near-contemporaries like Adrienne Rich, to poets working today. What many contemporary poets have found most useful—and most objectionable—in his work may be a permission-granting hostility, which they have wrested away and turned back on Berryman himself. After speculating about lessons we could take from Berryman’s example, this essay concludes on a central question raised by his tumultuous reception: how can you ever be sure?

Lyric as Comedy

A poet walks into a bar... this book explores the unexpected comic opportunities within recent American poems about deeply personal, often embarrassing, experiences. Lyric poems, the book finds, can be surprising sites of a shifting, unruly comedy, as seen in the work of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, and Monica Youn. The book draws out the ways in which key American poets have struggled with persistent expectations about what expressive poetry can and should do. It reveals how the modern lyric, rather than bestowing order on the poet's thoughts and emotions, can center on impropriety and confusion, formal breakage and linguistic unruliness, and self-observation and self-staging. The close readings in the book also provide new insight into the theory and aesthetics of comedy, taking in the indirect, glancing comic affordances of poetry. In doing so, the book captures varieties of humor that do not align with traditional terms, centering abjection and pleasure as facets of contemporary lyric practice.

Comedy in an Age of Close Reading

This chapter focuses on John Berryman, who situates himself at the center of what he calls “the world” and uses everything else in the world to define his self. The chapter includes a poet reacting to the critical atmospheres in which Berryman developed, which is described as having been spoken by someone who seems to have chosen the wrong form and genre. The chapter also examines how Berryman flouts the canonical expectations of mid-century formalist criticism and suggests how he breaks and defaces his form to depict an unusually wide range of mental states. The chapter points out an iridescence between a lyric reading of The Dream Songs and the ways Berryman undermines that reading. It then explains how Berryman transcribes the less-than-perfect mind, such as its irrationality and obsessions.

The One Sane Milkman, I Fear

In his lifelong wrestle with what he called his “frenemy” God, John Berryman continually turned to the influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sacramental vision. Amidst his struggles with depression, alcoholism, and self-doubt, Berryman looked to Hopkins as a model for how to express, and how to embrace, difficult belief. A close reading of Berryman’s “Dream Song 377,” a poem that takes Hopkins as a subject and evokes one of his sermons, shows not only that Berryman adopted versions of Hopkins’s stanzaic and stress patterns, but also that he, along with Henry, his poetic alter ego in the Dream Songs, shared with Hopkins a hunger for a still center.

The Fire That Breaks

The Fire that Breaks traces Gerard Manley Hopkins’s continuing and pervasive influence among writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Not only do the essays explore responses to Hopkins by individual writers—including, among others, Virginia Woolf, Ivor Gurney, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Derek Walcott, Denise Levertov, John Berryman, Charles Wright, Maurice Manning, and Ron Hansen—but they also examine Hopkins’s substantial influence among Caribbean poets, Appalachian writers, modern novelists, and contemporary poets whose work lies at the intersection of ecopoetry and theology. Combining essays by the world’s leading Hopkins scholars with essays by scholars from diverse fields, the collection examines both known and unexpected affinities. The Fire that Breaks is a persistent testimony to the lasting, continuing impact of Hopkins on poetry in English.

HISTORY OF CONFESSIONAL POETRY IN INDIAN WOMEN WRITINGS A SHORT OVERVIEW

‘Confessional’ is an adjective first applied to the poems of the American poets Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, W.D. Snodgrass, John Berryman and Theodore Roethke to refer to the autobiographical nature of their work. The confessional poet considers the world, an extension of herself. All confessional poetry springs from the need to confess; confessional poets bare their soul and body and hide nothing between their self and their direct expression of that self. They put no restrictions on subject matter, no matter how personal. Usually anti-elegant and anti- establishment, confessional poems are almost like war-cries triumphing over pain and defeat. The best confessional poems are more than confessions: they are revelations, about their creator’s personal vexations, dilemmas and predicaments, and above all about the human condition. This review work tries to prove that confessional poetry was always present in Writings by women in India. This work is a literature review of known writings by women in India.

Dylan Thomas and American Poetry: ‘a kind of secret, but powerful, leaven’

In The Poetry of Dylan Thomas (2013), John Goodby argues that ‘[t]he scope of Thomas’s impact on US poetry is remarkable, and it testifies to his characteristic hybrid ambivalence’. In the spirit of elaborating on this observation, this chapter considers how a number of quite different American poets have engaged with Thomas’s work, including Charles Olson, Delmore Schwartz, Elizabeth Bishop, and Denise Levertov. The essay also brings into focus the more explicit dialogue established throughout the poetry of John Berryman, for whom Thomas was a constant and almost familial figure from the 1940s to the end of his career. In Dream Song 88, Berryman imagines Thomas in the afterlife ‘with more to say / now there’s no hurry, and we’re all a clan.’ In this chapter, the idea of American poets belonging to or seeking to belong to such a ‘clan’ is examined, up to and including the work of a number of contemporary poets and schools of verse. The chapter takes a broad view, then, of the many ways Thomas has influenced the writing of poetry, and in doing so scrutinises the way the history of American poetry has so often been narrated.