Berryman’s Fate

They return: the slippery, stage-struck Henry, his burnt-cork minstrel buddy, countless walk-on pals & gals, the ghost of a suicide-father, a gallery of wives and lovers, a front row full of idolatrous undergraduates, and enough dead poets to crowd a sprawling country churchyard. “Requiescant in pace,” Berryman added hopefully to an explanatory note introducing His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, the 1968 volume of “dream songs” in which he announced that his favorite toy, Henry, and his wide cast of supporting characters were being laid to rest. As Berryman expected, however, no one got any rest—not the poet, not his hero, and especially not the critics, whose dreams continue to be troubled by the tricky identities and the perplexing literary stratagems of Henry and his gang.

Yet critics thrive on such trouble. And so did Berryman’s reputation. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965 for 77 Dream Songs, he also received the National Book Award for the sequel, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, in 1969. Critics and poets, including Berryman, were soon promoting The Dream Songs (1969) as one of the major long poems in our literature, up there with Whitman’s Song of Myself (Berryman’s acknowledged “model”), Eliot’s Waste Land, and Pound’s Cantos. Few seemed entirely sure what The Dream Songs were all about, but The Waste Land, if it proved anything, proved that opacity need be no barrier to critical receptivity. Helps create university jobs, too: “will assistant professors become associates/by working on his works?” Henry asks half-jokingly, half-resignedly in one of the last dream songs. For even though his awards, his Maileresque grandstanding, his “lost weekend” style of alcoholism, and his much-publicized self-destructive impulses helped create for him a larger and more diverse audience than contemporary poets are accustomed to, Berryman, a university professor himself, knew that his hard-core reader- ship would be chiefly academic.

RA

About the Author

Robert Atwan

Featured Tags

Manage following

Literature

Poetry

They return: the slippery, stage-struck Henry, his burnt-cork minstrel buddy, countless walk-on pals & gals, the ghost of a suicide-father, a gallery of wives and lovers, a front row full of idolatrous undergraduates, and enough dead poets to crowd a sprawling country churchyard. “Requiescant in pace,” Berryman added hopefully to an explanatory note introducing His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, the 1968 volume of “dream songs” in which he announced that his favorite toy, Henry, and his wide cast of supporting characters were being laid to rest. As Berryman expected, however, no one got any rest—not the poet, not his hero, and especially not the critics, whose dreams continue to be troubled by the tricky identities and the perplexing literary stratagems of Henry and his gang.

Yet critics thrive on such trouble. And so did Berryman’s reputation. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965 for 77 Dream Songs, he also received the National Book Award for the sequel, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, in 1969. Critics and poets, including Berryman, were soon promoting The Dream Songs (1969) as one of the major long poems in our literature, up there with Whitman’s Song of Myself (Berryman’s acknowledged “model”), Eliot’s Waste Land, and Pound’s Cantos. Few seemed entirely sure what The Dream Songs were all about, but The Waste Land, if it proved anything, proved that opacity need be no barrier to critical receptivity. Helps create university jobs, too: “will assistant professors become associates/by working on his works?” Henry asks half-jokingly, half-resignedly in one of the last dream songs. For even though his awards, his Maileresque grandstanding, his “lost weekend” style of alcoholism, and his much-publicized self-destructive impulses helped create for him a larger and more diverse audience than contemporary poets are accustomed to, Berryman, a university professor himself, knew that his hard-core reader- ship would be chiefly academic.