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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ 'An image of the dead' : the modern role of elegy with special reference to John Berryman's Dream Songs. Jepson, Jeffrey The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 10. Oct. 2021 `An Image of the Dead': the Modern Role of Elegy with Special Reference to John Berryman's Dream Songs. by Jeffrey Jepson submitted for the degree of PhD University of London 1998 King's College London ß156 LONßMN Ut; IV. 2 ABSTRACT This is a study of the changing nature of elegy, with reference to the poetry of John Berryman, notably his major work, The Dream Songs. Through comparative studies of some of the most significant elegies in English, including `Lycidas', Adonais, `When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd' and In Memoriam, I intend to show that Berryman has achieved a radical change in the construction of mourning poetry. In his use of complex patterns of personae, schizophrenic shifts of tone and voice, and the motif of the American minstrel, Berryman has provided a sense of mourning that goes beyond the occasional and places elegy at the heart of his poetics. I shall look at the elegiac elements in his early poetry and that of his closest contemporaries, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke and Delmore Schwartz, the so-called Middle Generation. With reference to certain Freudian and post-Freudian ideas, I will discuss Berryman's obsessive empathy, his drive to elegize, and explore the connections between this and the crisis of identity that the Songs' use of persona evokes. I will look at the Songs as a whole, showing that elegy is not simply contextualized by them, but is fundamental, and that the protean protagonist, Henry, is driven by the `irreversible loss' to which the poet refers in his prefatory note, and which is echoed and enlarged by the losses of friends, authors and admired mentors that ensued through the poem's composition. I In his manic presentation of self and his use of the minstrel voice, Berryman brings together notions of death and persona to reevaluate elegy at the most basic level. By questioning the integrity of poetic consciousness, he makes his elegies at once more intimate and more universal, making the notion of elegy for the self the crux of his poetics. 'The Dream Songs(New York: Farrar, Straussand Giroux, 1969; London: Faber and Faber 1990), p. v. 3 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Max Saunders for illuminating advice and vital encouragement; ShamoonZamir, for sharp analysis and strong opinion; my family for interest, concern and assistance;Sara Haslam for helpful hints and healthy competition; Timothy Gough for routine humiliation; and especially Alison Godfrey for boundless patience and constant belief. 4 Contents p. 5 Introduction p. 20 Chapter One `My Destined Um': Elegies of Milton, Whitman, Tennyson and others with reference to Berryman p. 65 Chapter Two The Elegiac in the Work of Berryman's contemporaries p. 97 Chapter Three The Development of Berryman's Elegiac Voice p. 129 Chapter Four `A Disadvantageof Surviving': Henry's Elegies and Berryman's Loss p. 155 Chapter Five `He has been known to mourn': The Dream Songs as Elegy p. 178 Chapter Six `We hafta die': Berryman's use of the minstrel voice and its relevance to elegy p. 196 Chapter Seven Beyond Henry: Concepts of Self and Mourning in Love & Fame p. 227 Conclusion 5 Introduction The poetry of John Berryman, especially his major work, The Dream Songs, is complex and allusive; intriguing to some, needlessly recondite to others. My aim in this thesis is to defuse to some extent these extremes of opinion in favour of a more concrete assessment by isolating and examining closely a specific strand of this major work, the elegiac, rather than attempting to come to terms with his poetry through any kind of inclusiveness, which has in some'critical studies led to a seemingly inevitable light treatment. The Dream Songs itself is so inclusive, in its references to people, places, events and works of literature, that any critical attempt to codify and limit its heterogeneity seems ill-advised and less worthwhile than looking from close range at just one part of Berryman's poetics and using this analysis to draw wider conclusions. The aspectof Berryman's work I shall be writing about is his use of elegy. The Dream Songs contains a number of elegies to friends, contemporaries and figures of literature who died during the twelve-year period over which the poem was composed. Berryman, with these elegies, seems to be attempting to achieve a very different effect from those of the elegists with whom we might be familiar in the canon, though he still retains many of the conventions to which they adhered. It is the difference with which I shall be chiefly concerned. The broader parts of discussion within my study will be attendant upon this central issue. My intention is that by working closely on Berryman's elegies I can achieve an investigative emphasiswhich ultimately allows for a more educated comparative approach than by attempting to deal in generalities; that is to say, the conclusions drawn from Berryman's elegiac work can be applied to his other poetry and ultimately his poetic method, so that everything regarding Berryman outside The Dream Songs and outside of elegy becomes, rather than background material, a source of comparative analysis. It is in this same sensethat I shall be introducing the work of other poets to my investigation; not just to compare elegies (although chiefly that) but to compare their approaches and their poetics with Berryman's; to trace the methodology of the elegist, and how 6 and whether this deviates from their apparentartistic aims as a whole. A connected issue in this study of elegy is the notion of the self and the inherent paradox of a poem which is intended to praise another in death often betraying reflection upon a self in life. While this is of course not new to elegy (in fact it is fundamental), I would suggestthat Berryman's emphasison it, and the context of these elegies within a long poem which is, in a sense,all about persona, makes for a very different kind of mourning. I will be pursuing the theme of a reflected self with reference to Berryman's interest in Freudian analysis, exemplified by his exhaustive logging of his own dreams and his time spent in psychotherapy, as well as using the work of other psychoanalytic writers to demonstrate the centrality of this to the poet whose major work is after all called The Dream Songs.2 I intend to connect these elements to a further, vital aspect of The Dream Songs informs which the work as a whole and defines the uniquenessof its elegies - the use of the minstrel voice and the poem's connections with African and African- American culture. This motif draws together the themes of death and mourning, the uncertainty of the self, and the dream state as an ongoing metaphor for these other themes, into a distinctive, inimitable character with massive literary and cultural resonance. It allows for many associations but is unquestionably peculiar to Berryman's long poem. The sheer volume of deaths in Berryman's circle is a crucial factor in the history and character of his generation of poets, known as the Middle Generation, which included Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke and Delmore Schwartz. Although one can trace certain similarities in their work, it is as friends and colleagues that they are put together as a group. It was in their lives as much as, if not more than, in their poetry that they resembled each other; dogged by trauma, mental distress and tragedy. Berryman might be seenas the self-appointed chronicler in verse of this period of American literature. It was in this mode that Berryman came to distinguish himself as an elegist, in a voice that I believe sets out a new agenda for 2John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 247-8 (hereafterLife). 7 Berryman, forcing him, ironically, to turn away from influences and develop a novel, distinctive manner. I want to show that this transformation with respect to Berryman's progression towards The Dream Songs had a particular impact on the nature of the elegiac poem. Within the context of the Songs, with their manic protagonist and their diversity of both subject and viewpoint, Berryman appears to have blurred the edges of an accepted definition of elegy.