Poetry Berryman

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EVALUATING poetry is a thankless task. There are no absolute standards of judgment, only wavering ones which depend on the fluctuation of taste and times. Perhaps the easiest way to criticize new poetry is to compare it to old poetry in an attempt to gain some perspective on its merit.

If comparison is the easiest form of criticism, then the reader can get a sense of Love and Fame by comparing it to Catullus. Berryman is much like Catullus, a poet with a gloating ego, harping on his sexual prowess and his reputation, dropping names and places, an impudent golden boy. Berryman catalogues his life in this book, and every day of it is made larger than life.

But Berryman is not the Catullus of the Lesbia poems. Most of all, he exhibits a distinct lack of tenderness, none of the possessive but touching love of a Catullus. His poems assert his genius, his talent, his machismo, nowhere celebrate the virtues of another. This is only fair, since Love and Fame is an autobiography. In it, Berryman traces his life from Columbia and Cambridge through an asylum to riches, reputation and religion. The book is in sections, each a stage of his life, and the poetry corresponds, starting brash and young, ending old and mellow.

The first section is somewhat unattractive at first glance. The opening poem. "Her and It." seems glib, rough, much too much like inferior e. e. cummings. Thus: "I fell in love with a girl. / O and a gash. / I'll bet she now has seven lousy children. / (I've three myself, one being off the record.)" This section celebrates Berryman's collegiate sexuality, makes ever so clear that he was Mark van Doren's prize pupil, and refers to Eliot as "Tom" and Joyce as "Jim." Berryman, of course, is noted for this sort of thing, the seeming arrogance which some how made the Dream Songs so fetching. Here, however, it becomes almost overpowering; the poems become one long stream of cute in-jokes.

As the book progresses, it becomes clear that this is a deliberate effect. The poetry about his undergraduate life is brash because it is undergraduate poetry, and Berryman a brash undergraduate, as he explains: "(My phantasy precisely at twenty: / to satisfy at once all Barnard and Smith / and have enough left over for Miss Gibbs's girls.)"

The second section begins as Berryman leaves America after college. At the same time, he leaves behind some of the callousness of the undergraduate poet. He is overwhelmed by Cambridge, by the poets who have preceded him there, and likewise removed from his hyperactive social life to "Monkhood": "I don't show my work to anybody, I am quite alone. / The only souls I feel toward are Henry Vaughan and Wordsworth." The Berryman of this section is naive, lacking the cocky self-assurance of his undergraduate predecessor. He is easily awed by Paris, and completely stripped of his Columbia sophistication.

THE BERRYMAN of the middle period is the most appealing, perhaps because he is the most human. The third period is more introspective, almost Gothic. Leaving Cambridge, and growing older, he confronts his asylum days in "The Hell Poem." The immediate temptation is to compare this to Lowell's "Waking in the Blue," and Berryman suffers in contras. Whereas Lowell's great asylum poem is stark, blunt, terse, and brutal, Berryman's, though realistic, is somewhat verbose and not a little self-pitying. The degree of self examination throughout these poems is frightening, mirroring the mind of a man gone slightly mad.

There is a fourth section to this book, but it is not part of the autobiography. It is a series of "Eleven Addresses to the Lord," written after Berryman's great conversion. All poets, these days, have great conversions, and all seem compelled to write about them. Religious poetry is perhaps the most difficult kind of poetry to write, certainly the most difficult to write well. Berryman, alas, does not succeed. Some of this section is passable, but much of it is like the first "Address": "Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflakes . . . "

Love and Fame, despite its publisher's claims, is not all that different from earlier Berryman. It is marked with the stamp of his character, so familiar from his earlier work. Some of it is not great poetry, but much of it is very fine indeed. On balance, it is probably the most important book of American poetry published in the past year.