‘Bitter Sister, Victim!’—Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

Abstract

John Berryman was very fond of declaring that it took him exactly five years to write Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,¹ from 22 March 1948 until 22 March 1953. One of the earliest of his journal references to the poem occurs on 4 April 1948, the next not until 1 August 1949, when he ‘drafted half a dozen stanzas for “Bradstreet poem”.’ He determined at that time to ‘fool’ the poem into ‘being and beauty’, but he was not to do so until 1952. Elisabeth Bettman remembers his torment from the time when he first got down to the work in earnest early in 1952:

He talked of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet in terms of his doubts as to being able to complete the work; he worried about a poem of that length, could he sustain its tone of intensity? Would it be of the quality he hoped it would be? He felt the strain of overwork very keenly … He discussed his creative difficulties at length and in detail … feeling that he couldn’t sustain the burden of trying to be scholar, teacher, poet.²

Anne Bradstreet was a real presence in his life. It was almost as if he was ‘in love’ with this dead woman. Whatever, she haunted his nights and days, and sometimes he could talk of nothing else. He worked in spurts. Sometimes he could go for hours on end, into the night without any sleep. At other times he would have a dry run that lasted for days. He was in torment at those times.³