Chapter 13 - John Berryman

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.