“WE WRITE VERSE WITH OUR EARS”: BERRYMAN’S MUSIC

MARIA JOHNSTON

Over the past three decades much of the criticism on ’s has tended to focus primarily on biographical details, the poet’s troubled childhood, his mental health, alcoholism, depression and the tragic circumstances of his death. Berryman, along with , , and , is regarded as one of the most outstanding figures of the “Middle Generation” of twentieth-century American poets, but the label of “Confessional” poet was one that Berryman himself held “with rage and contempt”.1 Here instead was a poet consummately dedicated to the craft of poetry, always attentive to the possibilities of language, serving his apprenticeship under W.B. Yeats and W.H. Auden and committing himself to a life of learning as he set about schooling himself to become a poet of remarkable technical mastery. Berryman viewed this process of apprenticeship as integral to the development of all artists, as he declared in an interview with William Heyen when he drew an insightful comparison between the composition of the sister arts of poetry and music:

I believe in apprenticeship. Suppose I wanted to be a composer and write piano concertos. I don’t buy some music paper and sit down. I don’t know what an oboe can do! Isn’t that so? Okay. We serve an apprenticeship.2

1 Peter Stitt, “The Art of Poetry”, in Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman, ed. Harry Thomas, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988, 21. 2 William Heyen, “John Berryman: A Memoir and an Interview”, Ohio Review, XV/2 (Winter 1974), 59. 192 Maria Johnston

Although no sustained examination of the technical aspects of Berryman’s poetry exists – the breadth of his poetic resource is often overlooked – some critics have made passing mention to the musical nature of the work. Edward Mendelson, for example, has stated how “are always patterned and often musical”, while Douglas Dunn has noted Berryman’s “use of musical-sounding verse”.3 Of the early, central influence of Yeats and Auden, Michael Dennis Browne – in an essay on Berryman’s work that enthuses over the “extraordinary art of these poems” and their “authority of music” – sees Berryman’s poetic mentors as masters of a similar “combination of passionate personal utterance and formal memorable music”.4 Browne was first “struck” by the “sheer music” of Berryman’s poems at a reading Berryman gave in 1971:

He read them slowly – more slowly at times than I would have thought possible – but there were also variations within this slowness, sudden bursts and accelerations, sudden drastic increases in volume. And the poems came over to the audience with an extraordinary combination of authority and intimacy – a kind of lyrical power that I had not heard in spoken poetry before.5

According to Browne, Berryman was wholly alert to the aural subtleties of language, the different registers of the human voice, the phonological effects and intricate patterns that shape poetry and the music of the line in verse. Heyen, indeed, has recalled that Berryman “was always noting lines, sounding out lines”.6 When asked in an interview about the process of beginning a poem, Berryman replied, “you get going with a pencil, and rhymes emerge and sentences emerge”.7 The attention to sound and form was, in other words, integral from the very start. In his introduction “Note on Poetry” in Five Young American Poets (1940),

3 Edward Mendelson, “How to Read Berryman’s Dream Songs”, in John Berryman, ed. Harold Bloom, New York: Chelsea House, 1989, 53-69; 54, and Douglas Dunn, “Gaiety & Lamentation: The Defeat of John Berryman”, in Berryman’s Understanding, 141. 4 Michael Dennis Browne, “Henry Fermenting: Debts to The Dream Songs”, Ohio Review, XV/2 (Winter 1974), 77. 5 Ibid., 76. 6 Heyen, “John Berryman: A Memoir …”, 48. 7 John Plotz, et al., “An Interview with John Berryman”, in Berryman’s Understanding, ed. Thomas, 13.