parching, back, brain burning, the grey pocks

itch, a manic stench

of pustules snapping...

--Be kind you, to one unchained eager far & wild...

But Berryman gets away with rhetorical excesses that would be preposterous in any other modern poet. Why? For one thing, the fact that Bradstreet is a long poem checkmates most of the poetics we have carefully engineered to deal with short lyric poems. Rhetoric is permissable when you're speaking in persona and pointing to something very great and very vague: the past. Demands of economy and tactile immediacy are more than satisfied by Berryman's aggressive, spiky, studied choice of words.

Constantly you feel that Berryman is daring to say something oceanic, then returning to the concrete with a thump or a blast. And the man is absolute master of his materials, which points less toward facility in the use of stanzas, rhymes, and meters--like Auden's--than toward an utter control over all the possible sounds and meanings of each word.

--Wan dolls in indigo on gold: refrain

my western lust. I am drowning in this past.

I lose sight of you

who mistress me from air. Unbraced

in delirium of the grand depths, giving away

haunters what kept me, I breathe solid spray...

But the old question of causes--formal and final--arises. Many critics have reacted unfavorably to the whole project. Why do it at all? Like a Tiffany vase without a mouth, what's it for? Speaking of conception as well as of language, Stanly Kunitz remarks "Berryman is tempted to inflate what he cannot subjugate." The effort to conquer an old emminence grise from the American past may be thought of as a false one, a spurious gesture of research toward a subject that is just not real.

As far as am concerned this is the only objection that can be raised to the poem. To write about yourself extrinsically and comically, as in the Dream Songs, is one thing: to sublimate your urge for self-projection in the posture you take toward a deliberately irrelevant subject is something else. Berryman is a little like Max Beckmann in his habits of constant self-depiction (which differs from self-revelation in that the latter is usually true), for running through Bradstreet is the image of the twentieth century poet in a tense pose of self-indulgence. But the worst that can be said of the poem is that it errs slightly in the direction of a naive, mannered Romanticism.

Two answers can be made. First, every lyric poem is rationalized to some extent on its model. All sorts of syntactic oddities are permitted in sonnets, for example, because they fulfill certain expectations, while the aesthetic order of a poem like Lycidas, random as it may seem today, is regular in terms of its formal cause: the genre. A poem on a "deep" subject--a poem as catholic in its intent as Paradise Lost--has no one model, but uses and subsumes many. Berryman had no model for the Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Harte Crane's The Bridge ("a set of lyrics") was out; Edward Arlington Robinson and Robert Browning were uncongenial ("I admire them, but I dislike them"). Eliot's Prufrock and Waste Land are disjunctive and impressionistic where Berryman's effort is continuous and expressionistic.

In the abrupt, resonant dialogue that forms the midsection of Bradstreet, Berryman was influenced by Anna Karenina and by Saul Bellow's novel Augie March, which he had just read in manuscript: "very ambitious, totally unlike most modern novels. It threw me the feeling that if I appeared to go outside the ordinary sort of business, that would be all right." The absence of any clear poetic precedent forces the reader to make a major revision of his conventional expectations.

The second answer runs deeper. Talk about Berryman keeps coming back to subject-matter, to content rather than form, to purposes rather than techniques. Just as the subject of Bradstreet, in the deepest sense, is Bradstreet, the Dream Songs are "about" Henry by God, and if Berryman's public descriptions of Henry are cagey, he is no more willing to divert the audience with coy adversions to his own skills or state of mind. For a long time poetry in this country has been working with an arsenal of familiar tools--"effects," "devices" and "meanings"--all largely technical considerations. Such a situation has often led to the spectacle of hordes of young men writing very well about very little. The reader is only encouraged to read the work, and locate all the sources of his response there.

Berryman's work simply cannot be read this way. None of the great creative violations of convention in literary history can be. Literature redeems itself by going the limit, by taking the same sort of risks that Berryman found in Augie March in the form of "an inquisitiveness, let's call it that, so extreme that it becomes a way of life, a tempting, a touching of all the boundaries..." No one, of course, can take risks who doesn't know the rules, but what is perhaps most impressive about John Berryman is his unwillingness to define expertise in purely technical terms. In a review of Hugh MacDiarmid he once wrote "a poet is to prove that he is not squeamish, as a poet (his private attitudes being nothing), by being absolutely responsible for his material and its psychological and spiritual employment, while technically he is absolutely independent of both. Flourishes will not do at all." Check.