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.” Berryman was drawn to the same intensity in the writing of poetry as he wanted in it, one being necessary to accomplish the other.He frequently spoke of the “valuable heat” of composition that he found most present in writing a long poem like “Boston Common” (TD) in 1942:[E]ach stanza appears a kind of mountain.… Until yesterday I could work only at night; during the days I read William James and Aristotle and Donne and generally waited, in a state best described as frenzy; at midnight I began.… Each session brings more mistakes than the last, as the effort needed increases, as my fatigue increases, and as I approach the unsayable centre.Most of them, so far, I have been able to correct—a poor term, “correct,” just as “mistakes” is, but you understand: mistakes, I mean, considered as a deviation from the top of intensity and truth [Letter to his mother, June 1942].John Keats—“the lovely man,” Henry says—would have understood Berryman’s “unsayable centre”: “[T]he excellence of every art,” Keats wrote, “is its intensity capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth.” (This quotation was one of the epigraphs Berryman considered using for Homage.) Both recognized that, for them, the actual composition of a poem was as important as the completion of it, for both seemed to hope to refire an intensity that evaporates the old self and tempers the new.Each new poem offers the possibility of the exhilarating grace of a new beginning, what Berryman sometimes experienced as “a freeing, with the creation of every real poem.” Each new poem comes as a gift and a prayer: “Gift us,” Berryman prays to God, “with long cloaks & adrenaline” (“Eleven Addresses to the Lord,” #4, L&F).“The sense of change … will abide.” The supreme expression of Berryman’s intensity in his life and poetry was his fear of death and his desire to embrace it.“How impatient [John] had been for death the late Dream Songs make clear,” writes Eileen Simpson, Berryman’s first wife and the author of Poets in Their Youth.Simpson suggests that Berryman’s being a poet did not, as she and others had sometimes believed, contribute to his suicide.On the contrary, “It was the poetry that kept him alive”; because of his “certainty that there were all those poems still to be written,” he lived nearly twenty years longer than his father.Berryman’s friend Saul Bellow cites the poem “Despair” (L&F), written several years after The Dream Songs, as an explanation of the suicide: “It seems to be DARK all the time.… I certainly don’t think I’ll last much longer.” “At last,” Bellow comments, “it must have seemed that he had used up all his resources.… The cycle of resolution, reform and relapse had become a bad joke which could not continue.”Whatever one’s view, Berryman’s suicide, in the context of his life, was also a final rebirth, a freeing.“The only comforting reflexion,” Berryman wrote several months before his death, “is not / ‘we will all rest in Abraham’s bosom’ & rot of that purport / but: after my death there will be no more sin.” Berryman would have delighted in Bellow’s idea of the “bad joke” of the cycle of resolution, reform, and relapse.“But, Saul,” he might have replied, “the cycle may end with a final re-formation.” He might have cited another poem written about the same time as “Despair”: “Rest may be your ultimate gift.Rest or transfiguration!” (“Eleven Addresses to the Lord,” #5, L&F).“The sense of change, suns gone up and come down,” he wrote in 1939, “Whirls in my tired head, and it will abide” (“At Chinese Checkers,” TD).Throughout his poetry and diaries, Berryman alternately lamented and celebrated moments of transition, especially the seasons of Christmas, Easter, spring, and his birthday.He either resolved or hoped, as in a primitive rite, for a necessary rebellion and a fresh beginning, a willed death and a new birth.Every new year, as Eileen Simpson writes, he anticipated “a magical rebirth.” His ambitious New Year’s resolves a little over two months after his first marriage are a typical example:To keep my temper, and to preserve an even manner; to feign self-possession if I can’t achieve it.Not to exaggerate unless my irony is perfectly clear.To keep my opinions to myself.To try to bring my humility and my arrogance together.Is a more regular current of feeling impossible?To be a better husband altogether.And a better friend: to allow, to have faith, to answer letters, to be kind.To keep the Journal and to make it continually more useful to me.To learn to know Christ.One of the engaging qualities of Berryman’s character is his ability to act as his own ironic observer.On January 2, 1955, he wrote to his mother: “I made no resolutions.None was necessary.I am all resolution.” But, in Flannery O’Connor’s phrase, his “habit of being” was a habit of seeking Verklärung, the moment of transfiguration and ecstasy.“I have been reading some notes about my dead self,” Berryman wrote in his diary in January 1940.“Of course it is not dead I am sad to say.What is needed is suicide each year, the dead one then to phoenix into change [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]