John Berryman

by John Berryman

  His Thought Made Pockets & the Plane Buckt (1958)

  Berryman’s Sonnets (1967)

  Love & Fame (first American edition, 1970; British revised edition, 1971; American second edition, revised 1972)

  Delusions Etc. (1972, published posthumously but selected and arranged by Berryman)

  The three collections Berryman selected from the above volumes include: Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and Other Poems (British edition, 1959; American edition, 1968); Short Poems (American edition, 1967); and Selected Poems (1938–1968) (British edition, 1972). “Formal Elegy” in Short Poems, now collected in CP, is the only work that did not appear in his previous collections.

  For CP, I have chosen, as a general guideline, the author’s corrected galleys and page proofs as the base texts. I have not incorporated the substantive changes that appear in at least thirty poems in Berryman’s later selected collections because I believe that each revised poem represents but one version of it. Even though his revisions of selected poems may postdate the first publication of them, one may speak only of the point at which he abandoned a poem and not, in my view, of his “final” intentions. Love & Fame, based on Berryman’s revised British edition; Berryman’s Sonnets, based on his original TS; and Delusions Etc., based on a combination of the printer’s MS and Berryman’s last revisions, must be, for reasons I explain in Copy-Texts and Variants, exceptions to my galley-proofs guideline.

  The Dispossessed (1948) is placed first in CP because it was his first major collection. Since TD incorporated over half the poems in “Twenty Poems” (1940) and Poems (1942), it reflects, I believe, the best complete overview of Berryman’s early poetry. As for the two early collections, only those poems not collected in TD are included in this new edition; both are appropriately accounted for in “Early Poems,” the last section of CP. (A list of the poems that appeared in “Twenty Poems” and Poems and again in TD may be found in Appendix B.) My arrangement of the collections is different from the order of publication in one other respect: Berryman’s Sonnets (now Sonnets to Chris), substantially completed by October 1947, follows TD. Berryman’s prefaces and dedications, however, are arranged in order of publication.

  Guidelines and Procedures: My first major task was to choose the texts (i.e., the copy-texts) CP would follow. I photocopied not only the extant galley and page proofs but also Berryman’s handwritten and typed manuscripts of each poem and collection. Most of these documents are at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis; others are at Columbia University, Harvard University, and Washington University in St. Louis.

  In order to determine the historical relationship of the composition, transmission, and publication of each collection, I arranged the photocopied texts in chronological order. Berryman dated many of the texts, some to the day and hour, but in some cases I returned to the originals to attempt to determine the date of composition or typing. Since the chronology of composition may be obscured by photocopies (that is, correctives obliterated or the types and age of paper leveled to uniformity), I compared my arrangement of the photocopies with the original manuscripts and proofs at Minnesota and Columbia. Berryman’s handwriting, the typeface and paper, and the relationship of all these to other dated manuscripts helped determine an approximate dating of some of the poems. I did not travel to Harvard and Washington Universities to see the galleys and printer’s typescripts of Poems and Thought because I did not believe the originals, in these cases, would reveal more than the photocopies. I did, however, examine the originals of all other HW and TS versions of the two collections at the University of Minnesota Archives. Berryman’s correspondence with his publishers before, during, and after the publication of a collection was helpful in determining the chronology of some texts. In four cases—Homage, Sonnets, L&F, and De—Berryman’s correspondence was available to me. In the remaining four—20P, Poems, TD, and Thought—his letters to his publishers could not be found.

  After I chose the copy-texts, I established the variants between them and the first editions, and, taking into account my editorial guidelines in spelling and mechanics, I removed inadvertent errors, where evidence existed, that were created by typesetting, printing, and proofing. My arguments for the selection of the copy-text for each collection are presented in Copy-Texts and Variants, but, briefly, I relied upon the following sources:

  “Twenty Poems” and Poems: the first editions

  The Dispossessed: the page proofs with reference to Berryman’s corrected galleys

  Berryman’s Sonnets (now Sonnets to Chris): Berryman’s original typescripts with handwritten changes that were completed in 1947 and the typescripts of his additional 1966 sonnets

  Homage to Mistress Bradstreet: Berryman’s corrected page proofs for Partisan Review (1953)

  His Thought Made Pockets & the Plane Buckt: Berryman’s corrected galley proofs

  Love & Fame: Berryman’s corrected page proofs for the British edition (1971), with some reference to the American second edition, revised

  Delusions Etc. (now Delusions etc of John Berryman): a combination of the printer’s copy and Berryman’s TS that postdates the printer’s copy

  My selection of most of the copy-texts of Berryman’s collections creates only a few variants in 20P, Poems, TD, Homage, and Thought. In the new text of Sonnets, however, there are just over two hundred variants. Likewise, L&F and De each show approximately fifty-five variants.

  I began editing CP with the hope of arriving at a set of editorial principles that would give a sort of scientific credibility to my selection of the copy-text. But whatever principles I determined—none could be absolute, I quickly learned—all seemed to point to the question of Berryman’s final intentions. Although Berryman’s final intentions for the selection and arrangement of the poems in each collection did not seem in doubt, his final intentions for the texts of certain revised poems, and therefore his intentions for the text of whole collections, are open to question. The copy-texts for Berryman’s Sonnets, published twenty years after they were written, and Delusions Etc., not proofed and corrected by Berryman, in particular called for a thorough investigation of the context of their composition and publication. His final intentions for the two volumes, as well as several revised poems in TD, were uncertain.

  Authorities on editing—W. W. Greg, Fredson Bowers, James Thorpe, Jerome J. McGann, William Proctor Williams, and Craig S. Abbott—confirmed that while I might attempt to divine Berryman’s “final” intentions, I would come closest to determining an accurate text by tracking the entire process of bringing each poem and each collection into print. The selection of the copy-text for his collected works depends, of course, on whether or not he would have preserved the historically accurate text, or the text that incorporated his subsequent revisions, or, as might very well have been the case, the revisions he would have made in bringing together his collected poems.

  The history of the texts of his three collections of “selected poems” strongly suggests that, for an edition of his collected poems, he would have as likely published the collections as they first appeared as he would have incorporated his later revisions. In one telling instance, he did not carry forward most of his revisions of the selected poems in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and Other Poems (1959) to the same poems in the later Short Poems (1967). Except for a few variables in the punctuation in the poem Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, the substantive changes in HomageAOP are limited to the selected poems from TD. Of the fifty poems in the first edition of TD, thirty-nine are collected in HomageAOP, and twenty-four of the thirty-nine poems show some fifty-five substantive changes and variables. And yet in the later selection of Short Poems, which includes all poems from the 1948 edition of TD, there are only twelve variants. Half the variants in Short Poems appear to be printing errors; the remaining six are changes and variables that also appear in HomageAOP (three word changes and three in punctuation). That Berryman did not carry forward all of his numerous 1959 changes in HomageAOP to Short Poems eight
years later suggests that he was mostly satisfied, at least in 1967, with the text of the first edition of TD.

  For his Selected Poems (1972), Berryman chose thirteen poems from The Dispossessed, the texts of which are the revised poems in HomageAOP. And yet, for example, in “Whether There Is Sorrow in the Demons” in Selected Poems, the word “screams” (l. 2), as it appears in both TD and HomageAOP, is emended to “creams.” This may be a printing error, but this is not the case in the deletion of the last two stanzas in the same poem. Such important variables do not strongly recommend the changes in Selected Poems as representing Berryman’s final intentions. And, too, if one observes the artistic integrity of TD as a whole, there are not enough poems (thirteen out of fifty) to make a case for carrying forward only these changes to his collected poems.

  Berryman’s intentions for a collection at the time it was completed appear to be as final—more so because each constitutes a whole—as the later changes he made in individual poems. Since he revised only selected poems, one may not speak authoritatively of his final intentions for a whole collection. His collections have their own artistic integrity; he selected and arranged each with some principle in mind—thematic, or chronological in order of composition, or a combination of both. In observing the artistic integrity of his collections as they were first published, one is not forced to create a fiction of the texts he might have chosen for his collected works (in Berryman’s case, his revisions of a selection of poems rather than his rethinking of a collection as a whole).

  Editorial guidelines on mechanics and spelling: “I am, a monoglot of English / (American version),” Henry observes, “and, say pieces from / a baker’s dozen others” (Dream Song 48). Like Henry, Berryman delighted in the play and undercurrents of foreign and rarely used words, and he drew upon a baker’s dozen of English, American, French, German, Italian, and Latin spellings, phrases, and usages. As Richard Eberhart observed in a review of The Dispossessed, Berryman’s use of language has an “intensity of perception newly, shortly, deftly placed, spaced and ‘estopped.’ Berryman is a man who can use the word estop. Estop is ‘Rare.’” One of the functions of the poet, Berryman believed, is to disrupt our expectations of language so that we are given a new angle of perception. Berryman’s spelling and mechanics are a part of the history of his newly, shortly, and deftly placed language. And yet some of his spelling and mechanics suggests arbitrary, as opposed to deftly placed, usage. In most instances, one cannot speak with absolute authority about whether or not his usage is arbitrary, but his punctuation of quotations and ellipsis points do appear to be so. Had he consistently preferred a certain style of ellipsis points and quotation marks in one period of his writing and a different style, say, twenty years later, it would be appropriate in his collected poems to be faithful to his change of preference. But that is not the case; he simply was inconsistent, sometimes in the same poem, in his use of quotation marks and ellipsis points.

  Ellipsis: As early as 1936, Berryman began writing in a nervous idiom (“mutter my verses,” he wrote in his 1947 notes on Sonnets). His personae speak haltingly and his syntax is disrupted. He indicated abrupt shifts in speech and thought with dashes, parentheses, and accent marks, but he favored ellipses most, at least up to about 1948. Thereafter, he dropped ellipses almost entirely (some appear in his subsequent collections) and indicated pauses and shifts with a double or triple blank space. In editorial usage, the three-point ellipsis (four points at the end of the sentence) indicates the writer’s intentional omission of words, usually in a quotation. The three-point ellipsis also signifies an abrupt change of thought, or a lapse of time, or an incomplete expression. I have adopted Berryman’s most common habit of a two-point ellipsis to indicate pauses and shifts, but in his quotations (punctuated as such), I have used three points to indicate omissions and incomplete expressions. Berryman was also inconsistent in his spacing of ellipsis points. In his typescripts, particularly those of TD and Sonnets, he most frequently indicated a two-point ellipsis without spacing (that is, “..”), but he did not change the galley or page proofs of either TD or Sonnets when the spacing followed house style of a spacing between the two points. Sometimes, too, he indicated a space after an ellipsis, as in the TS of Sonnet 5: “Laught . . Well, etc.” (l.12). When the line was published in both the American and British editions, the extra spacing was not indicated: “Laught . . Well, etc.” This change might also have been a matter of house style, but for Collected Poems I have observed spacing not only between the points but also, where Berryman indicated a space in his typescript, after them, as in “Laught . . Well, etc.”

  Quotation marks: In his prose, as early as 1931, Berryman adopted the British use of single quotation marks, or inverted commas. During his study in England (1936–38), the usage appears in his poetry. From that time through his last poems in 1971, he most frequently preferred single quotation marks; in a few instances, arbitrarily it appears, he used double quotation marks. Likewise, his use of commas and periods at the end of a quotation, especially in Love & Fame and Delusions Etc., seems arbitrary—sometimes inside, sometimes outside the marks. I have regularized his quotation marks to conform to his most frequent preference: single quotes with the comma and period inside the closing mark and all other punctuation outside, except the exclamation point and question mark that belong in the quotation. I have, nevertheless, followed Berryman’s habit of placing the comma and the period outside the single quotation mark in short phrases and single words, as in “‘genocide’.” (“New Year’s Eve”).

  Capitalization: Throughout his writing, Berryman capitalized words, primarily nouns, to personify or emphasize a concept or action, as in “Consternation and Hope war” (“A Point of Age”), “Bone of moaning: sung Where he has gone” (Homage), and “Add Sway omnicompetent, add pergalactic Intellect” (“Unknowable? perhaps not altogether”). These authorial capitalizations do not, of course, raise the question of whether or not to regularize them. But some of Berryman’s inconsistent capitalizations do raise the question; in “Fare Well,” for example, “Mother” is capitalized, but in “Song of the Tortured Girl,” it is not. Similarly, in his later addresses and prayers to God, he was inconsistent in the conventional capitalization of the pronoun referring to God. In Number 9 of his “Eleven Addresses to the Lord,” he capitalized the pronoun in the second stanza—“even to say You exist is misleading”—but in the next he did not—“flaring in your sun your waterfall.” I thought that perhaps Berryman might have been consistent in not capitalizing the possessive pronoun, but in “Interstitial Office” in the “Opus Dei” poems, one finds “Your lightning” and “Your torque.” Since I could not be certain that Berryman’s usage was arbitrary, I have not regularized his inconsistent capitalization.

  Foreign words and phrases: Berryman frequently quoted foreign words and phrases as though they belong to colloquial English and American usage. For the most part, throughout his writing, he did not italicize foreign words and phrases: in his early poems, “Che si cruccia” (“Parting as Descent”) and “peine forte et dure” (“The Long Home”); in his later poems, “Handel’s Te Deum” (“Matins”) and “actuellement” (“Sext”). And yet, for no apparent reason other than, perhaps, emphasis, he did italicize some foreign words and phrases: “on m’analyse” (“New Year’s Eve”), waren die unverlierbaren Freunde (“The Search”), and “‘Mordserum sie haben sagen. / Wo ist Doktor Dumartin? Doktor Dumartin / muss Doktor Dumartin finden!’” (“In & Out”). Since I cannot be certain that Berryman did not have a purpose in mind in his eclectic use of italics, I have not attempted to regularize his usage.

  Other punctuation: In keeping with his nervous idiom, Berryman elided syllables, as in “squat’” (“1 September 1939”) for “squatted” and “sweat’” (Sonnet 53) for “sweated.” In a few instances, he indicated the elision of two words, as in “[t]o-’have” (Sonnet 104). In at least one instance he experimented with the spacing of a colon in “New Year’s Eve”: “(Great e
vils grieve beneath : eye Caesar’s coin).” All of these usages, whether conventional or unconventional, have been allowed to stand. To indicate the pronunciation of a syllable normally elided in speech, he favored the acute accent rather than the conventional grave, as in “learned” (“Conversation”) and “filteréd” (Sonnet 47). I find only one instance of his using the grave accent in “vouchsafèd” (“Eleven Addresses,” #4). I have not emended his use of the acute accent; “vouchsafèd” I have allowed because in a more formal prayer, and word, he probably wished to use the traditional mark.

  Spelling: Berryman’s spelling is a baker’s dozen of British, American, and some French. He often favored the French spelling of a word, as in “trobador” (Sonnet 40) rather than the Anglicized “troubador,” and he retained the accent or circumflex that is usually dropped in English and American usage, as in “débris” (“Ceremony and Vision”), “régime” (Sonnet 57), and “rôle” (“The Heroes”). He particularly favored British spelling, and his most consistent usage was the “-our” ending, as in “honour,” “harbour,” “labour,” and “colour.” He was also consistent in the British spellings of “grey,” “cheque,” “kerb,” and “programme,” but for some words he preferred American spelling, as in “skeptical” (“Antitheses”) rather than the chiefly British “sceptical”; “maneuvered” (“The Heroes”) rather than the British “manoeuvered”; and “mustaches” (“The Dispossessed” and “Damned”) rather than the British “moustaches.” He did not adopt the common “-ise” British spelling, as in “civilise.” He consistently preferred the American “z” rather than the British “s,” as in “immortalized” (“The Statue”), “demoralize” (“World-Telegram”), and “unrecognizable” (“The Long Home”). Berryman seemed to change his mind about the spelling of some words. In his early collections, for example, he chose the American spelling of “fantasy” (“Letter to his Brother” and “Farewell to Miles”) and “reflections” (“The Possessed”); twenty years later, he used the British spelling, “phantasy” (“Two Organs”) and “reflexions” (“The Heroes” and “Of Suicide”). Several words, for whatever reason, are spelled two different ways; for example, “centre” (“World-Telegram”) and “center” (“Meeting”); “blond” (“Narcissus Moving” and Sonnet 1) and “blonde” (Sonnets 5 and 22). These inconsistencies have been allowed to stand.