For a poet who is attempting what many consider to be the most radical of recent experiments with language--the Dream Songs--John Berryman's poetic is ruthlessly functional. "The ordinary modern reader is sound asleep...Eliot understood this very well, in the Waste Land; it's necessary to kick him, otherwise he won't perform, and if he doesn't perform there's no poem. Because a poem is a reciprocal kind of action between the writer and the reader. No reader, no poem. It's like unperformed music, Bach scores lying in manuscript for hundreds of years. That's what a poem unread is like...Not too good...So you get the reader awake, and once he's awake you make sure he stays awake. And you tell him all of things he doesn't want to hear. But you tell them to him in a very dulcet voice, so that on the whole he's pleased with them."

Remarks like this are always startling when you're used to hearing delicate technical circumlocutions from poets, discussions of style at the expense of content. We have very thoroughly withdrawn from the theory of messages, Berryman no less than most; but the man is fully as anxious to see people grasp what the poem is about as he is to alarm and confuse them with unusual language. He began writing, he says, "as a burning trivial disciple of the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats," but Yeats "could not teach me to sound like myself (whatever that was) or tell me what to write about." What drove him away from Yeats, through periods of Eliot and Auden, and finally into the ambiguous arms of Anne Bradstreet, was in part, perhaps, a violent dissatisfaction with having nothing to say. "When I finally woke up to the fact that I was involved in a long poem, one of my first thoughts was: Narrative. Let's have narrative, and at least one dominant personality, and no fragmentation--in short, let's have something spectacularly not the 'Waste Land,' the best long poem of the age..."

This fully articulate dissatisfaction with the limits of the lyric form led him to adopt a rather insignificant historical figure and build an imaginary relationship with her. "Why did I choose to write about this boring high-minded Puritan woman who may have been our first American poet but is not a good one?" In a way, he says, "she chose me." "Your deep subjects, I'm talking about attempts at major poetry, not lyrics or meditative poems, they come and take hold of you... The point is to throw as much light as possible on her, and apparently at some point the decision was made to throw light on the twentieth-century poet, and to let this be explored in a dialogue."

The result is a long narrative masque in darkness between Anne and the poet. After the first four stanzas, the poet interrupts her monologue in three places. Finally she dies, and stays with him as the imaginary presence from the American past we have know her to be all along; then he turns to face the very real and serious world of the twentieth century. The poem leads us through her child-marriage to Simon Bradstreet, her crossing on the Arbella in 1630, her writing, the birth of her first child, her bout with smallpox, her religious difficulties, the expulsion of Anne Hutchinson from the colony, and her later life, all over-shadowed by the image of an angry God and quivering with the rhythms of guilt and insecurity. What emerges is a cerebral, passionate, deeply religious and thoroughly female Anne Bradstreet--innocent and worldly, orthodox and impatient with orthodoxy's drab practitioners, in love with her husband and with more than that, quietly violent in her sexual self-expression--the "always heretic" that is the poet in any language at any time. Whether this persona bears more than a verbal similarity to her prototype is a question better not asked, for Berryman's Homage is even less like history than the average historical novel.

The poem is no wearying topical exercise in verse-biography. The stanza-form, Berryman's invention, is difficult; the language is astonishing.

--It is Spring's New England. Pussy willows wedge

up in the wet. Milky crestings, fringed

yellow in heaven, eyed

by the melting hand-in-hand or mere

desirers single, heavy-footed, rapt,

make surge poor human hearts. Venus is trapt--

the hefty pike shifts. sheer--

in Orion blazing. Warblings, odours, nudge to an edge--

The choice of words, the dislocated syntax, the archaisms like "trapt" or the frequent use of accents--all show a taste for the bitter, explosive, tactile qualities of words that few poets demonstrate in greater intensity than Dylan Thomas. Occasionally the language slides off into bluster, or mist:

faintings black, rigour, chilling, brown