A brilliant and fiercely pitched sonnet cycle about love: at once
passionate, forbidden, and doomed
John Berryman was an unconventional poet, but he must have
surprised even himself when, in his thirties, he found he was
suddenly compelled to write sonnets. It was an unusual choice--even
an unpopular one--for a poet in a midcentury American literary
scene that was less interested in forms. But it was the right
choice, for Berryman found himself in a situation that called for
the sonnet: after several years of a happy marriage, he had fallen
helplessly, hopelessly in love with the young wife of a
colleague.
"Passion sought; passion requited; passion delayed; and, finally,
passion utterly thwarted" this is how the poet April Bernard, in
her vivid, intimate introduction, characterizes the sonnet cycle,
and it is the cycle that Berryman found himself caught up in. Of
course the affair was doomed to end, and end badly. But in the
meantime, on the page Berryman performs a spectacular dance of
tender, obsessive, impossible love in his "characteristic tonal
mixture of bravado and lacerating shame-facedness." Here is the
poet as lover, genius, and also, in Bernard's words, as
nutcase.
In "Berryman's Sonnets," the poet draws on the models of Petrarch
and Sidney to reanimate and reimagine the love-sonnet sequence.
Complex, passionate, filled with verbal fireworks and the emotional
strains of joy, terror, guilt, and longing, these poems are ripe
for rediscovery by contemporary readers.
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