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.

This chapter discusses the poets associated with the so-called “Middle Generation,” a transitional group of writers who were younger than the modernists but older than the poets of the New American poetry discussed in Chapters 1–4. It addresses how the poets of this cohort struggled with the long shadow of their modernist predecessors and addresses their struggles with alcoholism, personal crises, and mental illness. The chapter charts their move away from the New Critical formalist mode that reigned at mid-century toward a looser, more personal mode, which eventually gave rise to Confessional poetry. Focusing especially on Elizabeth Bishop (who distanced herself from Confessionalism), Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, this chapter discusses the major stylistic and thematic features of Confessionalism, controversies surrounding this movement, and its profound influence on contemporary poetry.