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“All Your Ages at the Mercy of My Loves”: Rewriting History in John Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 April 2014
Abstract
Since its 1953 publication, John Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet has incited debate. The text's dialogue with the first published poet of colonial North America has been described as a factual study, a redaction of adultery and a veiled critique of modern society. It is seldom noted, however, that Berryman's strategy of “modulat[ing]” his voice into Anne Bradstreet's raises key questions regarding his reappropriation of her life and writing. Does Homage's conscious ventriloquism problematize its status as a “historical” poem? And how might this revised understanding illuminate the work's relation to America's origins? This paper proposes a more multifaceted context for Homage's composition than has hitherto been recognized. Through mapping the poem's rewriting of history, I demonstrate it to be the product of both national and literary anxieties: if voicing Bradstreet enables Berryman to interrogate the American Dream's legacy, her canonical status casts scrutiny upon the contemporary poet's role in an age of sociopolitical tensions. Foregrounding Berryman's public self-positioning in Homage invites a reassessment of his engagements with society that liberates his oeuvre from “confessional” designations. As a result, it opens the way for readings that might situate Homage and The Dream Songs within the wider tradition of American epic poetry.
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References
1 John Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, ed. and with introduction by Charles Thornbury (London: Faber, 1991), 4.6–4.8, 287. Hereafter CP. All subsequent references, given parenthetically in the text, are to this edition.
2 Elizabeth Wade White, review of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, by John Berryman, New England Quarterly, 29 (1956), 545–48, 547–48.
3 Linebarger, J. M., John Berryman (New York: Twayne, 1974)Google Scholar, 72. Following Linebarger, Deanna Fernie has observed that “it is the condition of the modern poet in juxtaposition with his American ancestor that Homage explores.” Fernie, Deanna, “The Difficult Homages of Berryman and Bradstreet,” Symbiosis, 7 (2003), 11–34Google Scholar, 13. See also Coleman, Philip, “Nightmares of Eden: John Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,” Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, 10 (2004), 57–70Google Scholar; and Cooper, Brendan, “‘We Want Anti-models’: John Berryman's Eliotic Inheritance,” Journal of American Studies, 42 (2008), 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Coleman, 60.
5 John Haffenden, John Berryman: A Critical Commentary (London: Macmillan, 1980), 10.
6 Compare Sonnet 42, CP 91: “‘I want to take you for my lover’ just / You vowed when on the way I met you: must / Then that be all (Do) the shorn time we share?” Berryman's emphasis.
7 Brunner, Edward, Cold War Poetry (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001)Google Scholar, 3; Provost, Sarah, “Erato's Fool and Bitter Sister: Two Aspects of John Berryman,” Twentieth-Century Literature, 30 (1984), 69–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 71.
8 Cooper, 6.
9 John Berryman, cited in Haffenden, John, The Life of John Berryman (Boston: Routledge, 1982)Google Scholar, 196.
10 Berryman, John, “The State of American Writing,” Partisan Review, 15 (1948), 855–60Google Scholar, 857.
11 Berryman, John, “Poetry Chronicle, 1948: Waiting for the End, Boys,” in Berryman, , The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, 1976), 297–309Google Scholar, 305.
12 Berryman, John, “The Wholly Fail,” Poetry, 75 (1950)Google Scholar, 191.
13 Bercovitch, Sacvan, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar, 66.
14 Ibid., 74.
15 Robert Lowell, cited in Berryman, John, “Changes,” in Nemerov, Howard, ed., Poets on Poetry (New York: Basic, 1966), 94–103Google Scholar, 101.
16 Berryman, “Waiting for the End, Boys,” 299.
17 Brendan Cooper has argued compellingly that Berryman's career-long dialogue with his modernist forefathers is most profitably understood as “a generative hostility, a postwar anxiety of influence in which opposition and antagonism exist as catalysts for dialogue and interaction.” Cooper, 3.
18 Berryman, “Changes,” 99, 100.
19 Ibid., 101, 99–100.
20 These comments are taken from Berryman's 1947 notes for the unpublished essay “The American Intellectual and the American Dream,” held in the John Berryman Papers at the University of Minnesota. Permission to quote from unpublished material in the Papers has been granted kindly by Kate Donahue.
21 See Kaplan, Amy, “‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” in Kaplan, Amy and Pease, Donald E., eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 3–21Google Scholar, 9–10. In this illuminating essay, Kaplan reads Miller's career as “an effort to recover the original meaning of the errand … to counter the threatened end of the world by writing intellectual history.”
22 Cooper, 7–10. Coleman in particular suggests that the poet's meticulous research on his topic demonstrates a simultaneous desire to “dismantl[e]” and to inhabit “the myth of American exceptionalism.” Coleman, “Nightmares of Eden,” 64.
23 Berryman, “Changes,” 100. See also Berryman, John, “The Art of Poetry,” interview with Peter Stitt, in Thomas, Harry, ed., Berryman's Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 18–44Google Scholar, 33: “The idea was not to take Anne Bradstreet as a poetess – I was not interested in that.”
24 Berryman, cited in Haffenden, Life, 200.
25 Berryman, interview with Peter Stitt, 35.
26 Ibid., 33.
27 Bradstreet, Anne, The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse, ed. Harvard Ellis, John (Charlestown, MA: Cutter, 1867)Google Scholar, 101.
28 See for example Jantz, H. S., The First Century of New England Verse (New York: Russell, 1943)Google Scholar; and Murdock, Kenneth, Literature and Theology in Colonial New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 Matterson, Stephen, Berryman and Lowell: The Art of Losing (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 71.
30 Berryman, “Changes,” 100.
31 See Perosa, Sergio, “A Commentary on Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,” John Berryman Studies, 2 (1976), 4–25Google Scholar, 10–11.
32 Schweitzer, Ivy, The Work of Self-Representation: Lyric Poetry in Colonial New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991)Google Scholar, 129. See also Matterson, 71.
33 Elizabeth Wade White notes that there is “no evidence for, and strong argument against,” the poem's presumption of friendship between the women. White, review of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, 547.
34 Berryman, interview with Peter Stitt, 33.
35 Ibid., 33.
36 Matterson, 71. See also Simpson, Eileen, Poets in Their Youth (New York: Farrar, 1982)Google Scholar, 230; and Spencer, Luke, “Mistress Bradstreet and Mr. Berryman: The Ultimate Seduction,” American Literature, 66 (1994), 353–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
37 Berryman, interview with Peter Stitt, 34.
38 Joseph Mancini recognizes that Homage is “‘entirely voiced’ – quotation marks implied at both ends – so that [the poet] is speaking the entire poem, including [Bradstreet's] words,” but does not go on to discuss its radical implications for Berryman's engagement with his mistress's history. See Mancini, Joseph, “John Berryman's Couvade Consciousness: An Approach to His Aesthetics,” in Kelly, Richard J. and Lathrop, Alan K., eds., Recovering Berryman: Essays on a Poet (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 169–78Google Scholar, 175.
39 This reading is substantiated by the 1949 essay “The Poetry of Ezra Pound,” in which Berryman declares, “All the ambitious poetry of the last six hundred years is much less ‘original’ than any but a few of its readers ever realize,” before stating explicitly, “Poetry is a palimpsest.” See Berryman, John, “The Poetry of Ezra Pound,” in Berryman, , The Freedom of The Poet, 253–69Google Scholar, 258.
40 Provost, “Erato's Fool,” 77.
41 Martz, William J., John Berryman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969)Google Scholar, 27.
42 Berryman, “Changes,” 101.
43 Mariani, Paul, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996)Google Scholar, 254.
44 Matterson, 71.
45 Berryman, John, interview with Richard Kostelanetz, Massachusetts Review, 11 (1970), 340–47Google Scholar, 344.
46 John Haffenden records in his biography of Berryman that on 1 April 1949, reading about the murder of professors in The Black Book of Poland, the poet broke down and wept; as he would later state, “I just found I couldn't take it … I wasn't able at this time … to find any way of making palatable the monstrosity of the thing which obsessed me.” Berryman, cited in Haffenden, Life, 205–6.
47 Provost, 78.
48 Berryman, “Changes,” 100.
49 Martin, Wendy, An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984)Google Scholar, 72.
50 Golding, Alan, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995)Google Scholar, 69.
51 King James Bible, Zech. 14:12. Compare Zech. 14:20: “In that day shall there be upon the bells of the horses, HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD; and the pots in the Lord's house shall be like the bowls before the altar.”
52 Cooper, “‘We Want Anti-models,’” 8.
53 Astrid Franke suggests this “full ironic contrast” to be characteristic of a tradition of public poetry in America whereby, “Because contemporary poets can pose as publicly acknowledged powerless figures, they paradoxically gain a certain power of representation through widely shared feelings of powerlessness.” See Franke, Astrid, Pursue the Illusion: Problems of Public Poetry in America (Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Press, 2010), 1–34Google Scholar.
54 Coleman, “Nightmares of Eden,” 68.
55 Berryman's enduring fascination with colonial North America is evinced by the inclusion of “Not to Live” – a short piece subtitled “Jamestown 1957” – in his 1958 chapbook His Thought Made Pockets & The Plane Buckt. An ostensible celebration of the anniversary of the first successful English mainland settlement of America, its stark account of the settlers' trials in the Virginia wilderness contains striking linguistic and thematic correspondences with Homage. See CP, 157.
56 Berryman is quoting Fenollosa here; see Fenollosa, Ernest, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: An Ars Poetica,” in Pound, Ezra, ed., The Chinese Written Character as a Medium For Poetry: A Critical Edition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 41–74Google Scholar, 54, cited in Berryman, “The Poetry of Ezra Pound,” 265.
57 Berryman, cited in Haffenden, Life, 196.
58 Michael, John, Identity and the Failure of America: From Thomas Jefferson to the War on Terror (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008)Google Scholar, 25.
59 In the only article to date addressing this critically neglected poem, Philip Coleman highlights in “Formal Elegy” the “mode of irony that is close to its original meaning in ancient Greek where the eiron … was the character in the play who dissembled the plot” – a reading which might be profitably brought to bear upon the “I” as would-be seducer and would-be historian in Homage. See Coleman, Philip, “The Scene of Disorder: John Berryman's ‘Formal Elegy’,” Irish Journal of American Studies, 8 (1999), 201–23Google Scholar, 218.
60 Brendan Cooper outlines similar hopes in his book Dark Airs: John Berryman and the Spiritual Politics of Cold War American Poetry (Oxford: Lang, 2009), which, in comparing the work of Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg, offers a tentative indication of how such studies might alter present codifications of the American poetic canon. In any case, the recent appearance of Cooper's volume, along with Tom Rogers's monograph God of Rescue: John Berryman and Christianity (Oxford: Lang, 2011), represents a promising revival of interest in Berryman's oeuvre as the centenary of his birth approaches.
61 Berryman, cited in Haffenden, Critical Commentary, 26.
62 Berryman, John, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest: 308 Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, 1969)Google Scholar, ix.