John Berryman and the spiritual politics of cold war American poetry

• Main Author: Cooper, B. B.
• Published: University of Cambridge 2007
• Subjects: 810
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.597963

John Berryman continues to be critically perceived as an academic, establishment poet whose career represented a development from New Critical traditionalism towards a solipsistic, self-absorbed confessionalism. In this thesis, I seek to challenge such a limiting view through an exploration of his two long poems, <i>Homage to Mistress Bradstreet</i> and <i>The Dream Songs,</i> as works that extensively engage with contemporary American Cold War culture to a degree not admitted by such restrictive paradigms. Centrally, I examine the way in which Barryman’s engagement with religion occurs not simply as a personal questing, but as a form of cultural critique that is reflective of the politicised nature of Cold War American religious life. In chapter one, I interrogate the persistent critical tendency to codify American poetry since World War II in terms of an opposition between a ‘mainstream’ establishment centre and a countercultural ‘avant-garde’. I then seek in my second chapter to highlight the inadequacy of this canonical model, through an exposition of spiritual politics as a shared concern of the two poets most famously associated with the ‘establishment’ and ‘countercultural’ subdivisions of Cold War American poetry: Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg. In chapter three, I discuss the spiritual politics of Berryman’s <i>Homage to Mistress Bradstreet</i>. In chapter four, I challenge Christopher Rick’s suggestion that <i>The Dream Songs</i> is a ‘theodicy’, and show how recognition of the political nature of Berryman’s religious engagements actually exposes the poem as a form of ‘antitheodicy’, whereby its protagonist Henry is continually unable to reconcile the contemporary world in terms of any overarching scheme of divine justice. Finally, in my fifth chapter, I examine four key thematic concerns of <i>The Dream Songs</i> – World War II, the Cold War, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the minstrelsy and blackface traditions – in order to elucidate the heterogeneous contexts in which Berryman’s religiopolitical concerns operate.