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“We Want Anti-models”: John Berryman's Eliotic Inheritance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 March 2008

BRENDAN COOPER
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Abstract

In his study Modern Poetry after Modernism, James Longenbach criticizes the lingering critical perception of the postmodernist development in poetry as a “breakthrough” narrative that rebelled against the traditionalism and impersonality of Eliotic modernism. As he points out, postmodern poets in fact confronted Eliot via a series of intricate and ambivalent interactive processes that are not confinable within this “breakthrough” narrative. In this paper, I use Longenbach's argument as a starting point for a re-examination of Eliot's influence on the major poetry of one of his more apparently vocal opponents: John Berryman. Berryman's attitude towards Eliot was radically ambivalent, based on an idea that poetic predecessors must become “anti-models,” figures whom the contemporary poet can only incorporate through productive gestures of reaction against them. In the light of this idea, I show that in Berryman's major works, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and The Dream Songs, Eliot exerts a far stronger and more significant influence than has hitherto been recognized. My discussion of Berryman's participation in a postwar “Eliotic inheritance” allows for readings of these two poets that are not dependent upon crude oppositions between the “impersonal” and the “personal”. And as a consequence it opens the way for richer and more nuanced readings of Berryman's work as well as for invigorating reassessments of Eliot's own verse and his influence on twentieth-century poetry.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , April 2008 , pp. 1 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

1 James Longenbach, Modern Poetry after Modernism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 4. Longenbach favours a broad conception of “postmodern” poetry as any written self-consciously in the shadow of the modernist achievement, rather than any more ideologically oriented one that signifies more exclusively the term's associations with the avant-garde and postwar developments of the Pound tradition.

2 Ibid., 7.

3 Ibid., 6. Charles Altieri, an advocate of the “breakthrough” narrative and a supporter of James Breslin's analysis of postwar developments away from New Critical paradigms, expresses his opposition to Longenbach's argument in a long footnote in Postmodernisms Now: Essays on Contemporaneity in the Arts (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 1998) 83–84 n. One motive for this paper is to show how the case of Berryman provides support for Longenbach's argument, how his complicated engagement with Eliotic modernism is not confinable to the “breakthrough” narrative on which Altieri and others insist.

4 Longenbach, 5. Longenbach extends this point to suggest that “We may also need to abandon the notion that Life Studies is the crucial achievement in Lowell's career.” Ibid., 17.

5 Ibid., 7.

6 The paper directly leads to the larger question of Berryman's development of other modernist (or premodernist) models – in particular, other exponents of the long poem in whom Berryman betrayed significant interest, such as Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Bo Gustavsson briefly discusses Pound's Cantos as a “personal” epic that influenced Berryman's work in The Soul Under Stress: A Study of the Poetics of John Berryman's Dream Songs (Uppsala and Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1984), 30–32.

7 John Berryman, “One Answer to a Question: Changes,” in The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 323–31, 327.

8 Stephen Matterson, Berryman and Lowell: The Art of Losing (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 5.

9 John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota, “Speeches, Lectures, Readings.”

10 See, for instance, John Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary (London: Macmillan, 1980) 5–6; Fernie, Deanne, “The Difficult Homages of Berryman and Bradstreet,” Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, 7, 1 (2003), 14Google Scholar.

11 In a tribute to Pound, written on the occasion of his 80th birthday, Berryman wrote, “I cannot consider him the peer of Eliot as a poet. The body of his poetry may be more interesting, but I have in mind the sequence Prufrock-Gerontion-The Waste Land-Ash Wednesday-The Quartets, and Pound cannot rival it. Who can? Chaucer perhaps. Wordsworth? And I question as a devoted admirer of that great poet.” Such exuberant admiration of Eliot quashes any simple sense of Berryman's “dislike” or “rejection” of him. Later in the same piece Berryman notes that, in response to Pound, “Lowell went Miltonic: that was reaction: that's influence.” Berryman, “A Tribute,” Agenda, 4 (Oct.–Nov. 1956), 27–28.

12 In his conception of poetic influence as an antagonistic duel between a poet and his predecessors, Berryman's ideas bear clear resemblance to those of Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

13 Berryman, John, “A Peine Ma Piste,” Partisan Review, 15, 7 (1948), 826−28Google Scholar.

14 In the margins of his personal copy of the volume, Berryman scribbled disagreement with D. S. Savage's suggestion that Eliot displayed a “constant emphasis of impersonal values at the expense of personal ones,” and also Stephen Spender's opinion that “Gerontion” is an “objective” poem.

15 John Berryman Papers, Prose (Unpublished), Box 6.

16 “An Interview with John Berryman,” in Harry Thomas, ed., Berryman's Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 3–17, 5.

17 Longenbach, Modern Poetry, 8. In another unpublished essay, entitled “The Old Criticism,” Berryman – as the title implies – directly attacks the stultifying critical limitations of the New Critics. But Eliot – though he “stands behind the school” – is not included within it: “I think the persistently general character of Mr Eliot's interests and sympathies during this period forbids us to include him with what might be thought of as his school. If Eliot broadens and develops, as he does, the school has narrowed and died.” John Berryman Papers, Prose (Unpublished), Box 2.

18 See Ronald Bush, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); Ronald Schuchard, Eliot's Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Marjorie Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); David E. Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

19 Sharon Bryan recognizes “echoes of and resemblances to Eliot” in Berryman's poetry, but does not go on to note any specific allusions to Eliot in Berryman. See Sharon Bryan, “Hearing Voices: John Berryman's Translation of Private Vision into Public Song,” in Richard Kelly and Alan Lathrop, eds., Recovering Berryman: Essays on a Poet (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 141–46, 141.

20 See Gary Q. Arpin, The Poetry of John Berryman (Port Washington and London: Kennikat Press, 1978), 47; Provost, Sarah, “Erato's Fool and Bitter Sister: Two Aspects of John Berryman,” Twentieth Century Literature, 30, 1 (1984), 69–79, 69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Spencer, Luke, “Mistress Bradstreet and Mr. Berryman: The Ultimate Seduction,” American Literature, 66, 2 (1994), 353–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Haffenden, A Critical Commentary, 5. For such biographically oriented readings see Ibid., 5–10; Spencer, 353; and especially Provost, 69–79.

22 Coleman, Philip, “The Scene of Disorder: John Berryman's ‘Formal Elegy’,” Irish Journal of American Studies, 8 (1999), 201–23, 204Google Scholar.

23 Alan Golding, in the course of a study on canon formation in American poetry, is the only critic to my knowledge who has properly noted Eliot's influence on Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. See Alan Golding, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 57–69.

24 Arpin, 3.

25 All quotations are taken from John Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971 (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990).

26 Elizabeth Davis, “Berryman Saved from Drowning” in Richard Waswo, ed., On Poetry and Poetics (Tübingen: Narr, 1985), 171–90, 178–9.

27 George Oppen, Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1990), 203. The image of “foxholes” here, especially in the context of the references to genocide, maintains a connotative value behind its primary military meaning, as it suggests too the mass graves of the Holocaust. It also perhaps hints at the trenches of the First World War.

28 Ivy Schweitzer notes that these lines associate “the male poet's own moral corruption and spiritual emptiness with the decline of modern, postwar society, the rabidity of racist nationalism, and the abuse of nuclear power.” Ivy Schweitzer, “Puritan Legacies of Masculinity: John Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,” in Aliki Barnstone, Michael Tomasek Manson and Carol Singley, eds., The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 125–41, 139.

29 John Berryman Papers, Published Poetry, Box 2, Folder 10.

30 T. S. Eliot, “Baudelaire,” in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 427.

31 Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), 95.

32 Ibid., 96.

33 See T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 76.

34 Peter Stitt, “The Art of Poetry,” in Thomas, Berryman's Understanding, 18–44, 29.

35 Berryman, “A Peine Ma Piste,” 828.

36 Leonard Unger, ed., T. S. Eliot: A Selected Critique (New York and Toronto: Rinehar and Company, 1948), 133.

37 See Haffenden, A Critical Commentary, 56. All quotations are taken from John Berryman, The Dream Songs (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990s).

38 George F. Wedge notes Eliot and Dante as a possible source for Berryman's “Sienese face” in “The Case of the Talking Brews: Mr. Berryman and Dr. Hyde,” in Kelly and Lathrop, Recovering Berryman, 229–40, 235–36.

39 Anne Warner, “Dream Song 385: A Summing Up,” John Berryman Studies, 3, 1–2 (Winter–Spring 1977), 8–24, 20.

40 Eliot, Collected Poems, 82.

41 Arpin, John Berryman, 63.

42 In an unpublished manuscript fragment, Berryman was to write of “boredom as our prob. #1.” John Berryman Papers, Prose (Unpublished), Box 2.

43 Eliot, “Doris's Dream Songs,” The Chapbook: A Miscellany, 39 (1924), 36–37.

44 Eliot, Collected Poems, 131–32. As Michael North notes, the “Under the Bamboo Tree” piece from Sweeney Agonistes was taken from a Johnson–Cole–Johnson hit musical number – “a sensation during the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904, which Eliot attended with his family.” Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 10.

45 Eliot, Collected Poems, 39. See Denis Donoghue, “Berryman's Long Dream,” in Thomas, Berryman's Understanding, 152–66, 165.

46 Eliot, Collected Poems, 115–16.

47 The significance of Hodgson in this song has been thoroughly discussed in “A Symposium on the Last Dream Song,” John Berryman Studies, 3, 1–2 (Winter–Spring 1977), though all these critics remain resolutely silent on the significance of Eliot herein.

48 Eliot, Collected Poems, 151.

49 T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1934), 56.

50 Susan G. Berndt, “The Last Word,” John Berryman Studies, 3, 1–2 (Winter–Spring 1977), 75–83, 78, 83. A recent collection of essays on Berryman, edited by Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan, represents a resurgence of scholarly interest in Berryman's work that will hopefully nourish further reassessments of Berryman and his location in the canon of 20th-century American poetry. See Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan, eds., After Thirty Falls: New Essays on John Berryman (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 2007ss).

51 “The Art of Poetry,” in Thomas, 18–44, 25.