Volume 46, Number 14 · September 23, 1999
John Berryman's Flying Horse
By Anne Barton
Berryman's Shakespeare: Essays, Letters, and Other Writings
by John Berryman, edited by John Haffenden
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 396 pp., $35.00
'Oh my god!' John Berryman complained in October 1952, 'Shakespeare. That multiform & encyclopedic bastard.' Even then, twenty years before he plunged to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, Berryman had established an extraordinary and complicated relationship with the man from Stratford. It manifests itself, as John Haffenden's splendidly researched and edited collection of Berryman's (hitherto mostly unpublished) Shakespeare lectures, essays, and unfinished drafts for books makes plain, from 1936 to within a few months of his suicide. Haffenden's anthology tells us some things, certainly, that are persuasive and worth knowing about Shakespeare as he was read by a distinguished twentieth-century poet who also happened to have an appetite for textual scholarship. The book, however, is more important in the end for something rather different: what it reveals about Berryman himself, the tormented and gifted author of Sonnets to Chris, The Dream Songs, Love & Fame, and—above all—Homage to Mistress Bradstreet.
Review, 4199 words
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