Songs of the Self: Berryman's Whitman

Abstract

John Berryman's The Dream Songs and Walt Whitman's Song of Myself: the collocation sounds improbable, the former with their formal constrictions and regularities, their ironies and tensions, as well as their angularities, abruptnesses and disruptions, the latter free-form, open-ended, fluid, rhetorically fluent. Furthermore the collocation sounds unlikely in view of the fact that Berryman shared his generation's general, often knee-jerk, suspicion of Romanticism and ‘the romantic’ (the sliding back and forth in his prose between capital and lower-case ‘r’ signifying the kind of assumptions underlying the suspicion). The suspicion went with the territory, which was occupied by the forces of the New Criticism and the critical weaponry of T. S. Eliot, especially in the American academy (Berryman was an academic). (We have since learnt to question the New Criticism's anti-Romantic claims, and, even more, Eliot's championing of what was then called the ‘Classical’ over the ‘Romantic’ – but that is another story.)