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2 results

  • Chapter 13 - John Berryman

  • from Part IV - Contemporaries
  • Edited by Thomas Austenfeld, University of Fribourg, Grzegorz Kość, University of Warsaw
  • Book:
    Robert Lowell In Context
    Published online:
    28 March 2024
    Print publication:
    04 April 2024, pp 140-148

  • Summary

    Robert Lowell’s sense of connection with John Berryman was deep, so much so that one critic has suggested that “[a]lthough they never collaborated, their achievement was, in many respects, a joint one.” In his poem “For John Berryman,” Lowell references several points of contact between the two poets, from their “last years” back to their earlier “good days,” but Lowell’s sense of Berryman is still hard to pin down. This is partly a question of context – how the Lowell–Berryman relationship has been positioned in relation to various cultural and critical trajectories of twentieth-century American poetry – but it can also be explained in terms of the ways that Lowell’s poems record the poet’s shifting sense of his contemporary’s profile and achievement. Paying close attention to Lowell’s poetic engagement with Berryman, this chapter expands our sense of the relationship between two of the most important poets of the so-called Middle Generation.

  • Chapter 37 - The New York School

  • from Part IV - Beyond Modernism: American Poetry, 1950–2000
  • Edited by Alfred Bendixen, Princeton University, New Jersey, Stephen Burt, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of American Poetry
    Published online:
    05 December 2014
    Print publication:
    27 October 2014, pp 844-868

  • Summary

    Robert Lowell was the most esteemed American poet of his era, enjoying a reputation comparable to that of his great modernist predecessors T.S.Eliot and William Butler Yeats. Lowell's influence on later generations continues to be felt and of the middle-generation poets he is second only to Bishop in this regard. Lowell was drawn to address the turmoil of his era in no small measure because his own life was itself manifestly turbulent. The careers of John Berryman and Theodore Roethke parallel that of Lowell in several crucial ways. Although both were slightly older than Lowell, Roethke was born in 1908, and Berryman in 1914, they rose to their greatest prominence, as Lowell did, in the 1950s and 1960s. Berryman remained rather uncomfortably close to his mother throughout his life, and the death of his father became one of the overarching concerns of The Dream Songs.