`We Used the Language As If We Made It'

Thirty-five years ago today, back in school after the holiday break, I sat in the first meeting of my Victorian Poetry class. I have forgotten the professor’s name but remember him discussing Robert Browning when he asked if we had heard about the death of John Berryman. It was late afternoon, the sky was dark and the room was cloyingly hot from the old steam radiators. It was winter in northwestern Ohio, not really so far from Minneapolis, where Berryman had thrown himself from the Washington Avenue Bridge that morning.

Already, The Dream Songs was a sort of poetic Bible for me. I read the poems furiously until their music and wit were second nature. Berryman had patented a style of raffish despair in which the humor usually counteracted his instinct for self-pity. No one could render desolation with such color and American energy, turning Hopkins on his head, as in the first stanza of “Dream Song 29”:

“There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
so heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.”

In “For John Berryman I,” his friend and rival Robert Lowell wrote:

“I feel I know what you have worked through, you
know what I have worked through – we are words;
John, we used the language as if we made it.”

With Berryman, as with Shakespeare, Keats and Geoffrey Hill (though not Lowell), I’m in the company of a poet who, in the act of reinventing the language and staking it as his own, eclipses contemporaries and leaves them mumbling. Inevitably, their accomplishments are measured against his. Love and Fame, published less than two years before Berryman’s suicide, was savaged by misguided critics. It’s not The Dream Songs, no, but nothing could be. So near the end, when he could neither drink nor not drink – no sermons, please – he crafted “Eleven Addresses to the Lord.” In the first he wrote:

“Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake,
inimitable contriver,
endower of Earth so gorgeous & different from the boring Moon,
thank you for such as it is my gift.”