A poet’s letter …

… Berryman at letters by William Logan | The New Criterion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Letters, if not literature themselves, are servants to literature. They give the public face the texture of the private world. Depressively entertaining as Berryman’s are, they are unlikely to provide a future audience more than those of Dickens, or Shaw, or Elizabeth Bishop. They of course cannot answer the question that will always be asked: were Berryman’s poems any good? That raises a second question. Without the flaws and addictions, would we have had those poems at all? Had Berryman died at thirty-eight, as Dylan Thomas did, there would be no career to discuss.