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Poetic Self and Public World in John Berryman's Art

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Durham E-Theses The Issue of Our Common Human Life: Poetic Self and Public World in John Berryman's Art JORDAN, AMY How to cite: JORDAN, AMY (2013) The Issue of Our Common Human Life: Poetic Self and Public World in John Berryman's Art, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/6391/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 ABSTRACT Amy Jordan “The Issue of Our Common Human Life”: Poetic Self and Public World in John Berryman’s Art This thesis challenges the critical codification of John Berryman as a “Confessional” solipsist that has to date excluded his oeuvre from efforts to contextualise historically the mid-century generation of American poets. Its exploration of both the literary and the sociopolitical concerns that have shaped his verse furthers current understanding of the work by placing a new emphasis upon the interdependence of poetic self and public world. Through a chronological survey of Berryman’s published poetry, prose and manuscripts, I demonstrate his fears of marginalisation and the loss of individual agency to represent not an inner but an outward gaze, symptomatic of a wider malaise in post-war American society. Later chapters develop this framework by establishing parallels between the poems’ permeability to the flux of contemporary experience and their ambivalent depictions of Berryman’s growing literary fame. The result, I argue, casts fresh light upon the work as a movement towards a radical metapoetics that figures the persona as the simultaneous product of society and of the text’s public reception. Berryman’s staging of the symbiotic relationship between art and life foregrounds the central function of both self- and sociopolitical critique within his poetry: it highlights the impact of the failed American Dream upon public life and literary ambition. The Introduction provides a detailed outline of the approach and contents of the thesis. Chapter 1 examines the poet’s apprentice work in The Dispossessed and Sonnets to Chris, and relates dissatisfaction with the New Critical literary school to his subsequent discovery of a “new and nervous idiom” for the post-war world. In Chapter 2, I trace the motifs of national and literary expatriation in Berryman’s first long poem Homage to Mistress Bradstreet to discuss the dispossessed poetic “I” as a vehicle for exploration of American tensions past and present. Chapters 3 and 4 present a sustained analysis of Berryman’s epic poem The Dream Songs. Whilst Chapter 3 focuses upon the work’s depiction of American dystopia, Chapter 4 addresses its performance of Berryman’s own literary success, arguing for the later Songs’ origins in an anxiety of reception that desires to cement the poet’s status in an uncertain world. My final chapter reads Berryman’s last volumes Love & Fame and Delusions, etc. of John Berryman in the light of these discussions, suggesting his conflicting perceptions of fame to function as a catalyst for renewed efforts to reconcile the poetic self with wider society. “The Issue of Our Common Human Life”: Poetic Self and Public World in John Berryman’s Art Amy Jordan Thesis submitted for degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Department of English Studies Durham University 2012 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abbreviations and Notes on Texts 1 Statement of Copyright 2 Acknowledgements 3 Introduction: Roads in Unknown Regions, Partings Long Foreseen 4 Chapter 1: The Dispossessed and Sonnets to Chris 1.1 “To an Artist Beginning [His] Work”: First Crises of Self and Society 18 1.2 Towards a New and Nervous Idiom: The Dispossessed as Epistemology of 29 Loss 1.3 “The Thaw Alone Delays”: Writing Wrongs in The Dispossessed? 41 1.4 “Whether Wickedness / Was Soluble in Art”: Sonnets to Chris’ Fraud of the 48 Law Chapter 2: “Eight Poems” and Homage to Mistress Bradstreet 2.1 “The Future has Ceased to Exist”: Sociopolitical Dissatisfaction in “Eight 64 Poems” 2.2 An American Rebellion: Breaking Boundaries in Homage to Mistress 77 Bradstreet 2.3 “I Hear a Madness”: Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and the Dangers of 87 Transgression 2.4 Homage to Mistress Bradstreet as Twentieth-Century Critique 101 Chapter 3: His Thought Made Pockets & The Plane Buckt and The Dream Songs 3.1 The Search for a “New Rhythm of Life”: His Thought Made Pockets & The 108 Plane Buckt 3.2 “But There is Another Method”: The Dream Songs as Post-War Epic 124 3.3 The American Dream Songs: Versifying Dystopia 138 Chapter 4: The Dream Songs 4.1 “From Othering I Don’t Take Nothin, See”: Outlaw/ed Identities in The 155 Dream Songs 4.2 “I was not Killed / by Henry’s Viewers but Maimed”: The Dream Songs as 175 Performance Anxiety 4.3 “You Go by the Rules but There the Rules Don’t Matter”: Conclusions 196 Chapter 5: Love & Fame and Delusions, etc. of John Berryman 5.1 “Henry Reacted Like a Snake to Praise”: The Autobiographical Art of Love 207 & Fame 5.2 Love & Fame as Reformation of Self / Word / World 220 5.3 “Almost Another Man”: Delusions, etc. of John Berryman 236 5.4 “If I Could Hear of a Middle Ground, I’d Opt”: Delusions, etc. and the 250 Problems of Reconciliation Afterword: A Future for Berryman Studies? 264 Bibliography 266 Abbreviations and Notes on Texts Unless otherwise stated, citations of Berryman’s published poetry are sourced from John Berryman: Collected Poems 1937-1971, ed. and introd. Charles Thornbury (London: Faber, 1991). Texts are referenced with the abbreviation CP and identifying page number(s) except in the case of the long poem Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, where stanza and line numbers are provided to assist the reader in locating specific passages. All quotations from The Dream Songs, which Thornbury’s volume does not include, are taken from 77 Dream Songs, 1964 (London: Faber, 2001) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest: 308 Dream Songs, 1968 (New York: Farrar, 1969). Individual Songs are referenced with the abbreviation DS and identified by their numbering in the sequence. Berryman’s “Eight Poems”, published in Poetry 75 (1950): 187-96 and uncollected elsewhere,1 are referenced with the abbreviation Poetry and identifying page number(s). All unpublished correspondence, poetry and prose of Berryman’s is referenced in accordance with its categorisation in the archive of John Berryman Papers held at the Elmer L. Andersen Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. The citation system is broadly hierarchical, prefixing individual works with the abbreviation JBPs before identifying them by material type and the box and folder numbers in which they are located (e.g. JBPs, Published Poetry, Box 2, Folder 2). Where no folder number is available, references instead give either the title of the piece contained (e.g. JBPs, Unpublished Prose, Box 1, Folder “Development of Modern American Poetry”) or a general description of the source (e.g. John Berryman Papers, Published Prose, Box 6, Yellow “Champion” Notebook). Additional works cited frequently are referenced with the following abbreviations: TFOTP John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, 1976) KJB The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997) 1 It should be noted that two poems in this collection, “not him” and [“not him”] “2”, were reprinted subsequently in His Thought Made Pockets & The Plane Buckt with the titles “from The Black Book i)” and “from The Black Book ii)” (CP 149-59). However, given that my discussion of these works locates them within their primary context, they are referenced with the abbreviation Poetry throughout. 1 The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the author’s prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. 2 Acknowledgements The lovely friends, and friends the friends of friends, pursuing insights to their journeys’ ends subtle & steadfast: the wind blows hard from our past into our future and we are that wind, except that the wind’s nature was not to last. (DS 282) I wish to thank the staff and students of Durham’s Department of English Studies, and especially my supervisor, Gareth Reeves, without whose guidance and patient support this project could not have been completed. Grateful thanks must also go to David Jordan and to Janet Gate for their financial assistance and warm encouragement throughout my postgraduate studies. The last four years of Berrymania would have been far lonelier without my family and friends, who have demonstrated an endless capacity to provide joyful distractions, lively conversation and moral support. I owe a resounding thank-you to Elizabeth Evans, Rosie Jordan, Shirley Jordan, Tom and Ruth Lambert, Richard Lawrie and the Watersiders, among many others. My deepest gratitude, however, is reserved for my partner, James, whose love and huge sense of adventure continues to make all things possible. 3 INTRODUCTION Roads in Unknown Regions, Partings Long Foreseen i.
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