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Berryman's Sonnets
1968. First Edition. 115 pages. No dust jacket. This is an ex-Library book. Brown cloth. Ex-library copy, with expected inserts and inscriptions. Pages remain bright and clear with minimal tanning and foxing. Minor dog-eared corners. Some creasing to gutter. Binding remains firm. Boards have mild edge-wear with slight rubbing to surfaces. Light crushing to spine ends. Noticeable sunning to spine and edges. Water staining to front board.
- GenresPoetryNonfiction
121 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 1967
About the author
John Berryman
146 books245 followersJohn Allyn Berryman (originally John Allyn Smith) was an American poet, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and often considered one of the founders of the Confessional school of poetry. He was the author of The Dream Songs, which are playful, witty, and morbid. Berryman committed suicide in 1972.
A pamphlet entitled Poems was published in 1942 and his first proper book, The Dispossessed, appeared six years later. Of his youthful self he said, 'I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.' His first major work, in which he began to develop his own unique style of writing, was Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, which appeared in Partisan Review in 1953 and was published as a book in 1956. Another pamphle.
His thought made pockets & the plane buckt, followed. It was the collection called Dream Songs that earned him the most admiration. The first volume, entitled 77 Dream Songs, was published in 1964 and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The second volume, entitled His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, appeared in 1968.
The two volumes were combined as The Dream Songs in 1969. By that time Berryman, though not a "popular" poet, was well established as an important force in the literary world, and he was widely read among his contemporaries. In 1970 he published the drastically different Love & Fame. It received many negative reviews, along with a little praise, most notably from Saul Bellow and John Bailey. Despite its negative reception, its colloquial style and sexual forthrightness have influenced many younger poets, especially from Britain and Ireland. Delusions Etc., his bleak final collection, which he prepared for printing but did not live to see appear, continues in a similar vein. Another book of poems, Henry's Fate, culled from Berryman's manuscripts, appeared posthumously, as did a book of essays, The Freedom of the Poet, and some drafts of a novel, Recovery.
The poems that form Dream Songs involve a character who is by turns the narrator and the person addressed by a narrator. Because readers assumed that these voices were the poet speaking directly of himself, Berryman's poetry was considered part of the Confessional poetry movement. Berryman, however, scorned the idea that he was a Confessional poet.
A pamphlet entitled Poems was published in 1942 and his first proper book, The Dispossessed, appeared six years later. Of his youthful self he said, 'I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.' His first major work, in which he began to develop his own unique style of writing, was Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, which appeared in Partisan Review in 1953 and was published as a book in 1956. Another pamphle.
His thought made pockets & the plane buckt, followed. It was the collection called Dream Songs that earned him the most admiration. The first volume, entitled 77 Dream Songs, was published in 1964 and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The second volume, entitled His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, appeared in 1968.
The two volumes were combined as The Dream Songs in 1969. By that time Berryman, though not a "popular" poet, was well established as an important force in the literary world, and he was widely read among his contemporaries. In 1970 he published the drastically different Love & Fame. It received many negative reviews, along with a little praise, most notably from Saul Bellow and John Bailey. Despite its negative reception, its colloquial style and sexual forthrightness have influenced many younger poets, especially from Britain and Ireland. Delusions Etc., his bleak final collection, which he prepared for printing but did not live to see appear, continues in a similar vein. Another book of poems, Henry's Fate, culled from Berryman's manuscripts, appeared posthumously, as did a book of essays, The Freedom of the Poet, and some drafts of a novel, Recovery.
The poems that form Dream Songs involve a character who is by turns the narrator and the person addressed by a narrator. Because readers assumed that these voices were the poet speaking directly of himself, Berryman's poetry was considered part of the Confessional poetry movement. Berryman, however, scorned the idea that he was a Confessional poet.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
April 7, 2019
Introduction
‘Why sonnets? Why on earth, in the middle of the twentieth century, a sonnet sequence?
In the case of John Berryman, the turning to sonnets, and more specifically, love sonnets, is completely of a piece with the nature of the personal crisis that prompted them. He was in his thirties; he had been contentedly married for several years; he was happily—and for him, luckily—teaching literature at Princeton. And then, out of the blue, inconveniently—and almost from the first, evidently unluckily—he fell in love with a young woman who was the wife of a colleague.
To a writer as self-scrutinizing as Berryman, this was a wonderful, terrifying, and guilty predicament...”
sonnet 91
‘How can we know with whom we ride, or soon
Or later, ever? You . . what are yóu like?
A topic’s occupied me months, month’s mind.’
sonnet 43
‘You should be gone in winter, that Nature mourn
With me your anarch separation, call-
ing warmth all with you: as more poetical
Than to be left biting the dog-days, lorn
Alone when all else burgeons, brides are born,
Children yet (some) begotten, every wall
Clasped by its vine here . . crony alcohol
Comfort as random as the unicorn.
Listen, for poets are feigned to lie, and I
For you a liar am a thousand times,
Scars of these months blazon like a decree;
I would have you—a liner pulls the sky—
Trust when I mumble me. Than gin-&-limes
You are cooler, darling, O come back to me.’
‘Why sonnets? Why on earth, in the middle of the twentieth century, a sonnet sequence?
In the case of John Berryman, the turning to sonnets, and more specifically, love sonnets, is completely of a piece with the nature of the personal crisis that prompted them. He was in his thirties; he had been contentedly married for several years; he was happily—and for him, luckily—teaching literature at Princeton. And then, out of the blue, inconveniently—and almost from the first, evidently unluckily—he fell in love with a young woman who was the wife of a colleague.
To a writer as self-scrutinizing as Berryman, this was a wonderful, terrifying, and guilty predicament...”
sonnet 91
‘How can we know with whom we ride, or soon
Or later, ever? You . . what are yóu like?
A topic’s occupied me months, month’s mind.’
sonnet 43
‘You should be gone in winter, that Nature mourn
With me your anarch separation, call-
ing warmth all with you: as more poetical
Than to be left biting the dog-days, lorn
Alone when all else burgeons, brides are born,
Children yet (some) begotten, every wall
Clasped by its vine here . . crony alcohol
Comfort as random as the unicorn.
Listen, for poets are feigned to lie, and I
For you a liar am a thousand times,
Scars of these months blazon like a decree;
I would have you—a liner pulls the sky—
Trust when I mumble me. Than gin-&-limes
You are cooler, darling, O come back to me.’
February 20, 2022
"And I for you a liar am a thousand times." What pitched passion unfolds in pitch-perfect sonnets Blazing rhymes. Steel lace. A vernacular veneer rippling between haute and hip, slick and slang. Berryman rattles Shakesbeard's tree. Every poem is a grappling hook in this tortured, exhilarating, gorgeous account of a torrid affair.
November 11, 2015
Wow! Old fashioned style sonnets, filled with modernism. Have never read something like this before.
August 15, 2022
Touching romance sneaks through Berryman’s awkward syntax and diction.
July 12, 2024
From what I’ve read of the dream songs they’re in a different league. Lot of awkward rhymes here that grow out of a dedication to the form (though he plays so fast and loose with some of the meters that I don’t know why he bothered caring that much about the scheme).
The most compelling parts of this sonnet sequence are the meta-textual components. Berryman uses the Petrarchan form, but unlike Petrarch and his muse Laura, Berryman really was having a consensual affair with his muse. This creates a kind of tension with the form, traditionally for unrequited loves and early courtships. Might position Berryman as a kind of Lacanian subject, unconscious search for the lost object of desire etc etc
The most compelling parts of this sonnet sequence are the meta-textual components. Berryman uses the Petrarchan form, but unlike Petrarch and his muse Laura, Berryman really was having a consensual affair with his muse. This creates a kind of tension with the form, traditionally for unrequited loves and early courtships. Might position Berryman as a kind of Lacanian subject, unconscious search for the lost object of desire etc etc
January 23, 2022
In her introduction to the new edition of Berryman's Sonnets (released to commemorate the centennial of the poet's birth), poet April Bernard aligns Berryman's Sonnets with the Sonnets of Petrarch, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Browning.
Her reasons for aligning Berryman with the aforementioned being twofold:
First, to juxtapose the historical contexts of the aforementioned poets with Berryman's relatively recent composition. She writes: "Why sonnets? Why on earth, in the middle of the twentieth century, a sonnet sequence?" (Introduction, vii) Indeed, Berryman's sonnets seem out of place in the context of the twentieth century. In a roundabout way, Bernard suggests that the Sonnets were as surprising in the twentieth century as the affair that inspired the sonnets was in Berryman's life. Readers familiar with Berryman's later poems may consider him a "womanizer" (particularly for the poems of Love & Fame). But it is Bernard's firm belief that the affair was to Berryman in his thirties, then "contentedly married for several years", "a wonderful, terrifying, and guilty predicament". (Introduction, vii)
Second, to draw out what is consistent in Berryman's Sonnets as in the Sonnets of the aforementioned poet... What Bernard calls "a passionate folly". (Introduction, vii) By which Bernard means the doomed love that is the subject of these Sonnets. "
"Petrarch's 'Laura' dies; Sidney's 'Stella' rejects him; Shakespeare's two loves, the 'fair young man' and the 'dark lady,' betray and disappoint; and even Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese ends pro forma with the dismissal of the lover as the speaker embraces death - although, as everyone knows, in 'real life' the poet found her happy ending." (Introduction, viii)
Berryman, true to formula, found no happy ending. But of this "passionate folly", Berryman bore sweet fruit in the form of the Sonnets. Here are a few of my favourite passages...
Her reasons for aligning Berryman with the aforementioned being twofold:
First, to juxtapose the historical contexts of the aforementioned poets with Berryman's relatively recent composition. She writes: "Why sonnets? Why on earth, in the middle of the twentieth century, a sonnet sequence?" (Introduction, vii) Indeed, Berryman's sonnets seem out of place in the context of the twentieth century. In a roundabout way, Bernard suggests that the Sonnets were as surprising in the twentieth century as the affair that inspired the sonnets was in Berryman's life. Readers familiar with Berryman's later poems may consider him a "womanizer" (particularly for the poems of Love & Fame). But it is Bernard's firm belief that the affair was to Berryman in his thirties, then "contentedly married for several years", "a wonderful, terrifying, and guilty predicament". (Introduction, vii)
Second, to draw out what is consistent in Berryman's Sonnets as in the Sonnets of the aforementioned poet... What Bernard calls "a passionate folly". (Introduction, vii) By which Bernard means the doomed love that is the subject of these Sonnets. "
"Petrarch's 'Laura' dies; Sidney's 'Stella' rejects him; Shakespeare's two loves, the 'fair young man' and the 'dark lady,' betray and disappoint; and even Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese ends pro forma with the dismissal of the lover as the speaker embraces death - although, as everyone knows, in 'real life' the poet found her happy ending." (Introduction, viii)
Berryman, true to formula, found no happy ending. But of this "passionate folly", Berryman bore sweet fruit in the form of the Sonnets. Here are a few of my favourite passages...
Cageless they'd grapple. O where, whose Martini
Grows sweeter with my torment, wrung on toward
The insomnia of eternity, loud graves!
Hölderlin on his tower sang like the sea
More you adored that day than your harpsichord,
Troubled and drumming, tempting and empty waves.
- from Sonnet 12
In a poem made by Cummings, long since, his
Girl was the rain, but darling you are the sunlight
Volleying down blue air, waking a flight
Of sighs to follow like the mourning iris
Your shining-out-of-shadow hair I miss
A fortnight and to-noon. What you excite
You are, you are me: as light's parasite
For vision on... us. O if my synchrisis
Teases you, briefer than Propertius' in
This paraphrase by Pound—to whom I owe
Three letters—why, run through me like a comb:
I lie down flat! under your discipline
I die. No doubt of visored others, though...
The broad sky dumb with stars shadows me home.
- Sonnet 27
Demand me again what Kafka's riddles mean,
For I am the penal colony's prime scribe:
From solitary, firing against tribe
Uncanny judgments ancient and unclean.
I am the officer flat on my own machine,
Priest of the one Law no despair can bribe,
On whom the mort-prongs hover to inscribe
'I FELL IN LOVE' ... O none of this foreseen,
Adulteries and divorce cold I judged
And strapped the tramps flat. Now the harrow trembles
Down, a strap snaps, I wave - out of control -
To you to change the legend has not budged
These years: make the machine grave on me (stumbles
Someone to latch the strap) 'I MET MY SOUL'.
- Sonnet 73
My senseless presence in your presence not,
My comments rather skew - They'll say 'I wonder
What is in Berryman lately? I find him stranger
Than usual' - working their nickel in the slot
They'll try again, dreamless they drag from yonder
Vexed to my leather chair this lathered ranger.
- from Sonnet 84
Down-soft my joy in the beginning, O
Dawn-disenchanted since, I hardly remember
The useful urine-retentive years I sped.
- I said as little as I could, sick; know
Your strange heart works; wish us into September
Only alive, and lovers, and abed.
- from Sonnet 90
April 25, 2011
These sonnets are sometimes explicit, sometimes beautiful, sometimes incomprehensible. I feel like they drove me to insanity, and then somewhere in the middle they helped me regain the sanity they stole from me. But by the end I was insane with them once more.
I recommend them, but only to the patient.
I recommend them, but only to the patient.
January 17, 2018
"Unless my lungs adapt me to despair,
I'll nod off into the increasing, wide,
Marvelous sleep my hope lets herald me."
"I have heard nothing but the sough of the sea
And wide upon the open sea my friend
The sea-wind crying, out of its cave to roam
No more, no more . . until my memory
Swung you back like a lock: I sing the end,
Tolerant Aeolus to call me home."
So I hadn't heard of Berryman before I moved to Minnesota, and once finding out about him, I think a friend recommended the Dreamsongs, maybe I read one or two and thought it might be cool to read up on him, you know, modernist poets, why not? I found this book randomly at a used book store so I said to myself, "Well Anders, why not start here?" And so here we are, my first experience with a full Berryman text.
This book of poetry was exactly what it promised to be: a torrid love affair in the form of 115 sonnets. And: a combination of the traditional sonnet form with modernist American diction and sensibilities. I found the combination to be pleasant, at times too opaque or boring, at others quite virtuous and profound--warranting pondering. Berryman is also considered to be part of the "confessional writing" style of poetry which very clearly comes out in this work. Although, it seems sort of second-nature that a collection of poems written in the 1st person by one of the parties in a torrid love affair would be, in a word, confessional.
What's more? Well the style really is exquisite-I mean that it was done well, though sometimes I found it to be jarring or inscrutable. I'll say that Berryman knows his stuff, takes full advantage of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and copious amounts and degrees of ellipsis, allusion, diction, elision, and other poetic techniques to make the sonnets fit their proper form but also bring something new. It's pleasurable to read a poet like this, but sometimes it's also irritating. They know more than me and I have to look stuff up. He puts things too vaguely and I don't want to think so hard to figure out what he's saying. But at the pleasurable times, things do line up and the message is a fine beam of light, prepared to warm or sear, with passion or grief.
Corresponding to these two sides of the poetry I've identified, my reaction was also bifurcated. The enjoyable moments were either intensely unbearable for their passion or delivered a dour mind beyond repair. It's things we've all experienced, those of us who have been in love under not ideal circumstances. It's hard to confront those things, just like it's hard for most people to confront the feelings that they're too busy to deal with. I'm not saying this poetry will have some sort of psychotherapeutic effect on you, but it may be something relevant to your experiences. Recognizing that love exists in difficult circumstances isn't the most outlandish thing to affirm, regardless.
There's something else I want to say to on top of the joy and irritation I experienced: There's something about the idea of a man, or a character, writing 115 sonnets that express various levels of passion and heartache that transcends my joy and the irritation. This is a man who has spilled out the ordeal of his love fraught with pain and that in itself is an overpowering testament to his will. At the end of reading the book I found myself emotionally drained. Maybe I'm taking things to seriously, but to quote Rilke, "Sex is difficult, true. But difficult things are what we were set to do, almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious. If you only acknowledge this and manage from your own resources, from your own disposition and nature, from your own experience and childhood and strength, to win your way towards a relationship to sex that is wholly your own (not influenced by convention and custom), then you have no need to fear losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your best possession" (From #4, Worpswede near Bremen, 16 July 1903 trans. Charlie Louth). This is the great struggle we all conduct ourselves in and these poems are a testament to that.
So yes I enjoyed this. I would recommend it to those readers of modernist American poetry or those interested in the sonnet form. I will say though that most of the poems are quite dense so to the untrained eye they may be tiresome. But, at the same time, there are quite a few fine turns of phrase that may be pleasing in other ways without subterranean scrutiny.
Here's probably my favorite (57):
"Our love conducted as in heavy rain
Develops hair and lowers its head: the lash
And weight of rain breed, like the soundless slosh
Divers make round a wrack, régime, domain
Invisible, to us inured invisible stain
Of all our process; also lightning flash
Limns us audacious and furtive, whom slow crash
On crash jolt like the mud- and storm-blind Wain.
If the rain ceased and the unlikely sun
Shone out! . . whom our stars shake, could we emerge
Trustful and clear into the common rank,--
So long deceiving?--Days when Dathan sank
Quick to the pit not past, darling, we verge
Daily O there: have strange changes begun?"
I'll nod off into the increasing, wide,
Marvelous sleep my hope lets herald me."
"I have heard nothing but the sough of the sea
And wide upon the open sea my friend
The sea-wind crying, out of its cave to roam
No more, no more . . until my memory
Swung you back like a lock: I sing the end,
Tolerant Aeolus to call me home."
So I hadn't heard of Berryman before I moved to Minnesota, and once finding out about him, I think a friend recommended the Dreamsongs, maybe I read one or two and thought it might be cool to read up on him, you know, modernist poets, why not? I found this book randomly at a used book store so I said to myself, "Well Anders, why not start here?" And so here we are, my first experience with a full Berryman text.
This book of poetry was exactly what it promised to be: a torrid love affair in the form of 115 sonnets. And: a combination of the traditional sonnet form with modernist American diction and sensibilities. I found the combination to be pleasant, at times too opaque or boring, at others quite virtuous and profound--warranting pondering. Berryman is also considered to be part of the "confessional writing" style of poetry which very clearly comes out in this work. Although, it seems sort of second-nature that a collection of poems written in the 1st person by one of the parties in a torrid love affair would be, in a word, confessional.
What's more? Well the style really is exquisite-I mean that it was done well, though sometimes I found it to be jarring or inscrutable. I'll say that Berryman knows his stuff, takes full advantage of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and copious amounts and degrees of ellipsis, allusion, diction, elision, and other poetic techniques to make the sonnets fit their proper form but also bring something new. It's pleasurable to read a poet like this, but sometimes it's also irritating. They know more than me and I have to look stuff up. He puts things too vaguely and I don't want to think so hard to figure out what he's saying. But at the pleasurable times, things do line up and the message is a fine beam of light, prepared to warm or sear, with passion or grief.
Corresponding to these two sides of the poetry I've identified, my reaction was also bifurcated. The enjoyable moments were either intensely unbearable for their passion or delivered a dour mind beyond repair. It's things we've all experienced, those of us who have been in love under not ideal circumstances. It's hard to confront those things, just like it's hard for most people to confront the feelings that they're too busy to deal with. I'm not saying this poetry will have some sort of psychotherapeutic effect on you, but it may be something relevant to your experiences. Recognizing that love exists in difficult circumstances isn't the most outlandish thing to affirm, regardless.
There's something else I want to say to on top of the joy and irritation I experienced: There's something about the idea of a man, or a character, writing 115 sonnets that express various levels of passion and heartache that transcends my joy and the irritation. This is a man who has spilled out the ordeal of his love fraught with pain and that in itself is an overpowering testament to his will. At the end of reading the book I found myself emotionally drained. Maybe I'm taking things to seriously, but to quote Rilke, "Sex is difficult, true. But difficult things are what we were set to do, almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious. If you only acknowledge this and manage from your own resources, from your own disposition and nature, from your own experience and childhood and strength, to win your way towards a relationship to sex that is wholly your own (not influenced by convention and custom), then you have no need to fear losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your best possession" (From #4, Worpswede near Bremen, 16 July 1903 trans. Charlie Louth). This is the great struggle we all conduct ourselves in and these poems are a testament to that.
So yes I enjoyed this. I would recommend it to those readers of modernist American poetry or those interested in the sonnet form. I will say though that most of the poems are quite dense so to the untrained eye they may be tiresome. But, at the same time, there are quite a few fine turns of phrase that may be pleasing in other ways without subterranean scrutiny.
Here's probably my favorite (57):
"Our love conducted as in heavy rain
Develops hair and lowers its head: the lash
And weight of rain breed, like the soundless slosh
Divers make round a wrack, régime, domain
Invisible, to us inured invisible stain
Of all our process; also lightning flash
Limns us audacious and furtive, whom slow crash
On crash jolt like the mud- and storm-blind Wain.
If the rain ceased and the unlikely sun
Shone out! . . whom our stars shake, could we emerge
Trustful and clear into the common rank,--
So long deceiving?--Days when Dathan sank
Quick to the pit not past, darling, we verge
Daily O there: have strange changes begun?"
July 27, 2024
Berryman in love!!! Brilliant and difficult as ever.
January 7, 2025
Luck lies with the bone,
Who rushed (and rests) to meet your small mouth, risk
Your teeth irregular and passionate.
-- "[1]"
Squalor and leech of curiosity's truth
Fork me this diamond meal to gag on love,
Grinning with passion, your astonished martyr.
-- "[14]"
I am this strange thing I despised; you are.
To become ourselves we are these wayward things.
And the lies at noon, months' tremblings, who foresaw?
And I did not foresee fraud of the Law
The scarecrow restraining like a man, its rings
Blank... my love's eyes familiar as a scar!
-- "[45]"
I followed a cloud and finally I caught it,
Springing my ribbon down the world of green...
Shadow to shadow, under tropical day...
Flat country slow, alone. So in my pocket
Your snapshot nightmares where (cloth, flesh between)
My heart was, before I gave it away.
-- "[54]"
I prod our English: cough me up a word,
Slip me an epithet will justify
My daring fondle, fumble of far fire
Crackling nearby, unreasonable as a surd,
A flash of light, an insight: I am the shy
Vehicle of your cadmium shine... your choir.
-- "[66]"
When neither my fondness nor my pity can
O no more bend me to Esther with love,
Gladden the sad eyes my lost eyes have seen
With such and so long ache, ah to unman.
When she calls, small, and grieving I must move,
The horror and beauty of your eyes burn between.
-- "[83]"
A winter-shore is forming in my eye,
The widest river: down to it we dash,
In love, but I am naked, and shake; so,
Uncoloured-thick-oil clad, you nod and cry
Let's go!' ... white fuzzless limbs you razor flash,
And I am to follow the way you go.
-- "[11o]"
Who rushed (and rests) to meet your small mouth, risk
Your teeth irregular and passionate.
-- "[1]"
Squalor and leech of curiosity's truth
Fork me this diamond meal to gag on love,
Grinning with passion, your astonished martyr.
-- "[14]"
I am this strange thing I despised; you are.
To become ourselves we are these wayward things.
And the lies at noon, months' tremblings, who foresaw?
And I did not foresee fraud of the Law
The scarecrow restraining like a man, its rings
Blank... my love's eyes familiar as a scar!
-- "[45]"
I followed a cloud and finally I caught it,
Springing my ribbon down the world of green...
Shadow to shadow, under tropical day...
Flat country slow, alone. So in my pocket
Your snapshot nightmares where (cloth, flesh between)
My heart was, before I gave it away.
-- "[54]"
I prod our English: cough me up a word,
Slip me an epithet will justify
My daring fondle, fumble of far fire
Crackling nearby, unreasonable as a surd,
A flash of light, an insight: I am the shy
Vehicle of your cadmium shine... your choir.
-- "[66]"
When neither my fondness nor my pity can
O no more bend me to Esther with love,
Gladden the sad eyes my lost eyes have seen
With such and so long ache, ah to unman.
When she calls, small, and grieving I must move,
The horror and beauty of your eyes burn between.
-- "[83]"
A winter-shore is forming in my eye,
The widest river: down to it we dash,
In love, but I am naked, and shake; so,
Uncoloured-thick-oil clad, you nod and cry
Let's go!' ... white fuzzless limbs you razor flash,
And I am to follow the way you go.
-- "[11o]"
January 21, 2018
Berryman's Sonnets are an essential read to any Berryman nut. I could talk about him finding his form, etc, but that has already been done very well. The Sonnets are panned as his weakest work, which is a criticism I refute. Berryman's Sonnets are the most humane pieces of Berryman's body of work. The fist 20 or so Sonnets are confusing, and often disappointing, but the poems skyrocket in the latter portion of the book. They are heartbreaking, desperate, and, most of all, beautiful. Berryman removes himself from his abstractions and speaks to the reader's humane desire to love, and thus, ultimately crash into disappointment and desperation---a constant factor in life itself. Berryman's Sonnets are a must read.
In no way do they reach The Dispossessed, Bradstreet, and the Dream Songs in their entirety. The Sonnet's are simply a movement in the poet's brilliant career, and they are, in fact, brilliant.
In no way do they reach The Dispossessed, Bradstreet, and the Dream Songs in their entirety. The Sonnet's are simply a movement in the poet's brilliant career, and they are, in fact, brilliant.
Read
May 6, 2025I returned to these after many decades and find myself more comfortable with their obscurity (though perhaps they grow clearer at the end of the collection... and the end of the affair.) It feels like he was writing personally for his love affair with "Lise" and not intending them for publication, but thank god they were published. They are difficult and obscure, but you can see him establishing the style that he would perfect in the Dream Songs and the language is always a pleasure both for its music, its syntax and even some of his words. I wouldn't recommend these for a new Berryman reader, but if you want a twist on what can be done (rigorously!) with the form or just to explore his oeuvre, these are worthwhile and then some.
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August 1, 2022Only one of these sonnets (which together form a narrative sequence) appeared in print prior to the publication of this volume, published at the height of Berryman's popularity, if "popularity" is a word that one can accurately ascribe to poets. True to form--pun intended--Berryman again demonstrates his signature fragmented syntax & melancholic wit in their early genesis.
For more reviews, visit The Greater Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge https://miscmss.blogspot.com/2022/08/...
For more reviews, visit The Greater Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge https://miscmss.blogspot.com/2022/08/...
May 27, 2025
Read slowly, to spend time with the lines. The whole sequence is seen through a veil, with clear moments breaking through occasionally, but much of this is obscured—as though Berryman claims these parts as his own. No single poem is a slam-bang, shove-it-into-someone’s-hands showstopper, but the overall book is unforgettable.
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March 22, 2020Berryman's influences are manifold, but here, he likely owes his greatest debt to Petrarch.
March 24, 2022
I was hoping these would click for me, but they never did.
December 20, 2020
If Catullus was drunk and middle-aged writing about his affairs
February 10, 2011
It is hard to think of a collection, other than Shakespeare's Sonnets, where a single poetic form yields such a rich, complex, and subtle collection of ideas as in Berryman's Sonnets. Berryman was in the throes of an extra-marital affair when he wrote these poems, and themes of love found, love lost, and love illicit permeate the texts. Many of the poems allude to Tristan und Isolde, especially through references to ships and sailing, or by mixing up the magic potions of that opera with modern-day cocktails (Berryman was a very serious drinker all his life). Berryman was holding down a university teaching job at the time, so reference to works of literature abound (I especially love the poem beginning "Demand of me again what Kafka's riddles mean"). Some of these texts are among the most sublime expressions of love in modern English, at least as far as I'm concerned:
"Blood of my sweet unrest runs all the same...I am in love with you. Trapped in my ribcage, something throes and aches."
Wow.
"Blood of my sweet unrest runs all the same...I am in love with you. Trapped in my ribcage, something throes and aches."
Wow.
August 21, 2008
Sonnet-cycle chronicle of a tragic love, or, tragic sonnet-cycle chronicle of a love--Berryman style. You can see here the sensibility that becomes the Dream Songs. Berryman's sonnets are their own force and stand apart dauntingly in an exhaustive tradition.
October 17, 2014
”..I biked out leisurely one day because
My heart was breaking, and swung up with the casual
Passion of May again your sycamore..
Hand trembling on the top, everything was
Beautiful, inhuman, green and real as usual.—
Your hypocrite hangs on the truth, sea-sore.”
My heart was breaking, and swung up with the casual
Passion of May again your sycamore..
Hand trembling on the top, everything was
Beautiful, inhuman, green and real as usual.—
Your hypocrite hangs on the truth, sea-sore.”
September 1, 2019
Berryman's "Sonnets" is crammed full of some of his absolute 'delicious' best. This collection has instantly revitalised both the sonnet form and the love sonnet (sequence) for yours truly and is fervently recommended.
December 18, 2024
think i might (horror of horrors) prefer these to shakespeare's, which i've always found largely pallid and flat compared to the drama
February 5, 2013
These are often really over-rated or really under-rated. I find that interesting.
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