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Lives of the Poets
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17116 |
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BOOK WORLD
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12 / 1990 |
2,940 Words |
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Melvin Friedman
Melvin Friedman is professor of comparative literature at the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is author or editor of
more than a dozen books; his most recent are titled Pound/The
Little Review: The Letters of Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson
(New Directions, 1988) and Aesthetics and the Literature of
Ideas: Essays in Honor of A. Owen Aldridge (University of
Delaware Press, 1990). He serves on the editorial boards of a
number of journals, including Contemporary Literature, Journal
of Modern Literature, Studies in American Fiction, Studies in
American Jewish Literature, Journal of Beckett Studies,
International Fiction Review, Yiddish, and Studies in the
Novel. |
RANDALL JARRELL
A Literary Life
William H. Pritchard
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990
338 pp., $25.00
DREAM SONG
The Life of John Berrymen
Paul Mariani
New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1990
519 pp., $29.95
Samuel Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets, passed judgment on the lives and works of fifty-two poets who were central to the English literary enterprise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. No one has come forward to perform quite the same function for American poets, not even for the generation born just before and during the First World War. This frequently labeled "tragic generation" includes Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, and Delmore Schwartz. The closest thing we have to a Johnsonian assessment of this group is Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir (1982), which examines the years the author spent with Berryman, her first husband. Jarrell, Lowell, Roethke, Schwartz, Thomas, and many other writers move in and out of her narrative. Her title, with its Wordsworthian context - "We poets in our youth begin in gladness;/But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness" - suggests much of what we need know about Berry-man's generation. More recent books that perform a valuable service in illuminating this generation of "troubled writers" are Bruce Brawer's The Middle Generation: The Lives and Poetry of Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell (1986) and Jeffrey Meyers' Manic Power: Robert Lowell and His Circle (1987). (For the slightly later generation of poets we have Richard Howard's Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950 [enlarged edition, 1980].)
The 1980s produced distinguished biographies of Lowell and Schwartz: Ian Hamilton's Robert Lowell: A Biography (1983) and James Atlas' Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (1985). Now we have life studies of Jarrell by William H. Pritchard and Berryman by Paul Mariani, and intriguing studies they are. A glance through the indexes of both books reveals the extent to which Jarrell and Berryman touched each other's lives. Pritchard, early in his biography of Jarrell, quotes from Berryman's Dream Song 121, which contains the lines: "He endured fifty
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