My take on Berryman is different. He is less a confessional poet than an examination-of-conscience poet. He was raised a Catholic and attended a Catholic boarding school. I aways found his poems suffused with Catholic thought and feeling. Here is something else in which he figures: 'He Resigns' by John Berryman and 'The Widow's Lament in Springtime' by William Carlos Williams. (You can see and hear Berryman read. He is evidently quite drunk.)
"He Resigns" has always struck me as utterly heartbreaking. I first read it, if memory serves, not long after Love Fame came out in 1970. Berryman's suicide two years later made it seem all the more pertinent. Once, on a visit to Minneapolis, I went out of my to see the spot where he had jumped from the Washington Avenue Bridge. So, for me, Berryman's poems, have little to do with the mess he made of his life and everything to do with his guilt over that mess, which was not the sort of guilt we associate with psychoanalysis, but the guilt we feel when we know are sinners. A sense of this, it seems to me, is missing from Akey's piece.
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