Introduction

Abstract

The two souls whom Berryman had in mind were Anne Bradstreet and Henry, the personae of his most significant works. It is my view that the soul under stress, and under observation, is Berryman’s, and that the poet is everywhere at the centre of his work. His poetry may be regarded as the mythopoeic recomposition of his own experience. Berryman directs his attention always to versions of his own self. Robert Fothergill’s term ‘serial autobiographer’ is applicable to Berryman, in the sense that such a writer ‘constantly mediates between a provisional interpretation of his life’s meaning and direction, and the fresh experience which may modify that direction’.² In The Dream Songs, the work by which Berryman’s reputation will ultimately stand, the persona ‘Henry’ acts as the focus for what may be called (borrowing a phrase from Roy Pascal) ‘ideas and actions as effluents of a personality and a situation …’.³ Henry enacts Berryman’s subjective response in states of identity-consciousness which are continually altering, always insecure, demanding and defining. When all other schemes are exhausted, Henry is the unifying principle of the work. In an article on Ezra Pound, Berryman took a view which was to be realised in his own work: ‘Does any reader who is familiar with Pound’s poetry really not see that its subject is the life of the modern poet? … it is the experience and fate of this writer … that concern him.’ ⁴

All the way through my work … is a tendency to regard the individual soul under stress. The soul is not oneself, for the personal ‘I’, one with a social security number and a bank account, never gets into the poems; they are all about a third person. I’m a follower of Pascal in the sense that I don’t know what the issue is, or how it is to be resolved—the issue of our common human life, yours, mine, your lady’s, everybody’s; but I do think that one way in which we can approach it, by the means of art, coming out of Homer and Virgil and down through Yeats and Eliot, is by investigating the individual human soul, or human mind, whichever you prefer—I couldn’t care less. I have tried, therefore, to study two souls in my long poems.¹