Reflexiveness and Metaphysics in Twentieth-Century Poetry

Reflexiveness and Metaphysics in Twentieth-Century Poetry JohnHaffenden. John Benyrnan: A Critical Commentary. New York: NewYork University Press, 1980.216+ vii pp. Elizabeth Isaacs. An Introduction to thePoetry of Yvor Winters. Athens, Ohio: SwallowPress/ Ohio University Press, 1981. 216 + xiv pp. Grosvenor Powell. Language as Being in thePoetry of Yvor Winters. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. 172+xii pp. Kathleen Woodward. At Last, the Real Distinguished Thing: The Late Poems of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1981.175+ xiii pp. Ross Labrie Most twentieth-century American poets have concentrated on the lyric, and most have increasingly narrowed their field of vision to the drama of perception . Moreover, the ascendancy of science in the last hundred years has persuaded a number of contemporary poets that they have little authority to describe reality other than in terms of their own felt experience. John Berryman typifies this tendency toward reflexiveness in contemporarypoetry . About hismost important work, The Dream Songs,he remarked that the "subject was solely and simply myself. Nothing else. A subject on which I am an expert. Nobody can contradict me." In Berryman's case, it might be more accurate to say that he focused on his selves-the narrator, Henry and Mr. Bones in The Dream Songs, for example. John Haffenden's John Berryman: A Critical Commentary reemphasizes Berryman's reflexive relationship to experience. Berryman cuts down the distance between his own consciousness and that of the seventeenth-century Puritan poet, Anne Bradstreet, for instance, by not only attempting to seduce her in a cross-century encounter but also by altering her historical identity so that she comes to resemble aspects of himself. Indeed, when Berryman was finished with her, according to Haffenden, Bradstreet seemed more a reflection of the poet's defiant marital unfaithfulness in the 1940sthan the reconstructed seventeenth-century life that a number of critics have described her as being. Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 13, Number 3, Winter 1982 398 Ross Labrie Haffenden, who ispreparing the authorized biography of Berryman, isbest at biography and weakest at literary analysis. He offers brief, rather discursive comments on Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, The Dream Songs and Love & Fame, as well as extensive notes on The Dream Songs and on the late work,Delusions, Etc. What one wants in a work about Berryman-an analysis of the dazzling originality of The Dream Songs 'varieties of tone and diction, for example-one doesn't get in Haffenden's book. The notes to the Songs are certainly useful. It cannot but help to be told that the "Bhuvaneswar Dog" in Song #189 was the "name Berryman gave to a dog acquired in the summer of 1963"(p. 110).Perhaps some day, though, we'll know why. Haffenden has had access to Berryman's notes and available letters, and one can only feel grateful to him for making this material accessible to scholars. He sheds new light on the stages of composition involved in Berryman 's central works. He brings out once again the traumatic burden which the suicide of Berryman's father placed on him when he was a boy, an obsession that compares with that of SylviaPlath toward her father. The sharpness ofthe image of the dead father who, selfishly,it seems to Berryman, abandoned those close to him drains the survivors so that they have no alternative but to follow his lead: //life is a handkerchief sandwich, in modesty of death I join my father who dared so long agone leave me. A bullet on a concrete stoop close by a smothering southern sea spreadeagled on an island, by my knee. Youisfromhunger,Mr.Bones. (Song#76) One cannot deny the emotional power of these small, unrhymed poems, even ifthe structuring of The Dream Songs as a whole, Haffenden concedes, was more a matter of wish than fulfillment. Berryman entertained various schemes for his ever-expanding series, a sequence that he eventually added to with an unexplained compulsiveness until the original seventy-seven songs had ballooned to 385.He had from the beginning posited Henry as the unifying source of the poems, associating him in turn with the roles of Job and Achilles...