John Berryman: Lives of the Poet

Abstract

John Haffenden. The Life of John Berryman. Boston, London, &c.: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982. xiii + 451 pp. Eileen Simpson. Poets in Their Youth. A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1982. 272 pp. "[0]nly...very young persons or writers whose work really does bear no relation to their lives, tant pis pour eux," "den[y]" "the existence of" "those connexions, now illuminating, now mysterious, between the artist's life and his work." The words quoted come from the first sentence of "Marlowe's Damnations," the first essay in an anthology of John Berryman's prose arranged according to his instructions and published posthumously as The Freedom of the Poet (1976). The date to which the editor of that volume, Robert Giroux, assigns "Marlowe's Damnations" situates it at the moment when Berryman was completing the poem (Mistress Bradstreet) he would later characterize as "an attack on The Waste Land" and not long after the third reprinting (in 1950) of The Sacred Wood. It therefore seems safe to suppose that Berryman was writing with the best known of the essays in T.S. Eliot's book in mind—"Tradition and the Individual Talent"—and that he had a polemical eye especially on Eliot's declaration that "Poetry...is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality."