Henry’s “plights and gripes” are “bad as Achilles”.īerryman, along with Lowell, was identified with the movement known as “Confessional Poetry” – and, like every poet ever identified with a movement, rejected the label. His protagonist Henry – “huffy”, in the first word of the poem – isn’t allowed the dignity of classical verse and nor, for that matter, is classical verse. “Rilke was a jerk,” he exclaims at one point. It evidences deep reading – Berryman was a scholar-poet and most of his life was spent in institutions, usually academic ones – but slaloms around literary decorum.
#Happy bones poem free
But Berryman’s sequence was neither notebook nor history – it was a fantasia, wild, spiky, self-teasing, exuberantly free in tone. Lowell – under Berryman’s influence, it’s fair to assume – tried something similar with his big, open, much-revised sonnet-sequence Notebook and History. Requiescant in pace.Īfter prentice work that saw him labour in the shadows of (among others) Yeats, Berryman found the form: a sort of broken sonnet in three stanzas. The poem then, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants thereof. What he is most remembered for, though there are glories in his other work, is The Dream Songs, which you could think of as a poème-fleuve: he found (and there is an American tradition of this stuff going back to Whitman) an expansive, accretive, flexible open form that allowed him to somehow drift net the jetsam of a life and the flotsam of his place in the century.īerryman set out the situation of the poem in an introduction to the 1969 edition (the first part of the poem had appeared as 77 Dream Songs five years previously): He is, if this makes sense, a major cult poet – or a cult major poet feted in part for the manner of his death or his association with a generation of poets who liked to think of themselves as maudits. Since then, Berryman’s reputation has held up – though he has never quite been number one.
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