You can hardly call a writer Esoteric whose work is taught in two courses in the University. But the poet John McArdin Berryman, who visited Cambridge last month to great for the Advocate, enjoys a certain underground popularity in the East that is greater than the sum of the responsible remarks people make about him--partly because there is still a communications gap between the literary East and the no-less moneyed, no-less-well educated, but far less established West (Berryman lives and teaches in Minneapolis), and partly because his witty, original, finely wrought and somehow insurrectionary poetry offers a marked challenge to the Way Poems are Being Written in this country.

Rarely anthologized, sympathetic to many literary camps, but with a foot in none of them, John Berryman is as close to being sui generis as anyone but Blake, Trotsky and Christopher Smart. New York has adopted him only since the mid-fifties, for although his poems appeared n the Nation and the New Republic since the thirties, much of his earlier work and most of its critical acknowledgment were published in Chicago's Poetry. Today he is regarded by many as one who threatens the language and endangers the conventions it clings to.

That very reputation has made him a poet's poet, "that forlorn phrase," in William Meredith's words. And his role as an innovator relates directly to his role as a teacher and scholar. For better or for worse, Berryman is an academic--that once-unpleasant label that generated such a fuss in the late fifties. Most of his life has been spent in colleges and universities. Born in Oklahoma, in 1914 he was educated at Columbia, Clare College and Cambridge; since then he has taught "just about everywhere but the South," including Grinnell, Wayne (Detroit), Princeton, Minnesota--where he is now Professor of Humanities, on a leave of absence--and Harvard, where he was for two years an Instructor in English, with a Warren House office and an Appian Way, later a Beacon Hill, address. A student in his Freshman Composition course in 1941 remembers him as a cold and vigorous teacher who invited his students to his apartment, gave them drinks, played music and told them what and what not to like.

At Minnesota most of his teaching is done in large lecture courses, and he speaks of his students, vaguely. "I'd rather teach men than women, I suppose, Women are brighter, and generally work harder, but then they get crushes on you and you get crushed on them and that's no good...Men go on to law, or business, or something..."

Berrymar has united academic and creative pursuits more successfully than most recent poets. His Crane biography is the work of a strenuously intelligent man wrestling with one of his familiars; his first long poem, the Homage to Mistress Bradstreet(1953) treat a necessarily arcane subject, America's first poetress, the "tenth muse" Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672). It is a work of scholarship in fifty-seven stanzas that took four and half years to research. And his most recent book cangles whimsically with that ever less unattractive, increasingly charismatic image: the college professor.

Seventy-Seven Dream Songs, a chunk of an unfinished long poem on which he has been working since 1955, was published two years ago by Farrar Strauss. The dream songs, in a word, are unexampled. All the difficult on a first reading; a few, for me, remain nearly opaque after many. Berryman's of-repeated description is helpful: "The poem is about a man named Henry. ('It is entirely about a man named Henry,' he told his Harvard audience last month.) He has a tendency to talk about himself in the third person. His last name is in doubt. It's given at one point as Henry House and at other points as Henry Pussycat. He has a friend, moreover, who addresses him regularly as Mr. Bones, or some variation on that," Finis. At Harvard, he added, "In general, he does not hear his friend, who has no name. That is, I know his name, but none of the critics have come on it yet," Henry proves to be a lonely, lecherous, whimsical, unstable academic hipster in the process of growing old, with an extraordinary talent for becoming the people and things he likes. His friend is an odd presence at his elbow who cautions, encourages and describes him in minstrel-show dialect-a cranky Still Small Voice in blackface who is a part of, and yet apart from, Henry Pussycat/House.

Henry sits in the bar and was odd,

off in the glass from the glass.

at odds wif de world and its god.

his wife is a complete nothing,

St. Stephen

getting even.

Many of the poems are dialogues. "Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law aganst Henry./Mr. Bones: There is."

These queer exercises in disjunctive verse don't observe the ethics of polite conversation. Henry is addressed as Mr. Bones by a cat who might himself be Mr. Bones, but isn't. Moreover, there are no quote-marks and no stage directions, and there is no clear distinction made between the two voices by the language itself. Some parts of some songs are in a mad sort of recent Jazzese, the language of the post-vaudevillian Negro entertainer, without the furniture of dialect ("The jane is zoned! No nightspot here, no bar/there no sweet freeway, no premises..."); some of them talk about Henry (which is really the role of "his friend") in ordered, even ornate English: "Henry's pelt was put on sundry walls/where it did much resemble Henry..." Some mix the two languages: ("Henry lay in de netting, wild/while the brainfever bird did scales;") while some present experience that is clearly that of Henry's Negro friend, speaking without dialect; for example:

There were strange gatherings. A vote would come that would be no vote. There would come a rope.