Remembering John Berryman …

… Why bats are often happier than poets : Essays in Idleness. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

He was one of the innumerable lost: men & women of huge gifts, able to sing, but given no song; given instead freedom without purpose. It is, if you will, not entirely distinguishable from that “American Dream” that we heard invoked too many times in two recent political conventions: the self-made man in the land of laissez-faire, where nothing is impossible & “history is bunk.” (Which is not to condemn a little entrepreneurship.)

Well, that may be the political conventions' version of the American Dream. But here's what I wrote seven years ago on this blog about the original version:

The American Dream itself … can’t be easily equated with crass materialism. As it happens, the phrase “American Dream” not only had a precise time and place of origin, it also had a specific originator: historian James Truslow Adams coined it in his 1931 book The American Epic. According to Adams, it is “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” Small wonder the dream that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so famously had was, as he put it himself, “deeply in rooted in the American dream.”