Berryman & Hopkins

An interesting essay concerning Gerard Manley Hopkins' influence on John Berryman can be found here:

"On the surface, any linkage between Hopkins and Berryman seems strange. On the one hand, there is Hopkins - Jesuit priest, Classics scholar, largely unknown by readers and critics during his lifetime, dutiful, frail, an outsider, possibly homosexual, dead of consumption at age 44. Conversely, Berryman was the sodden, sexually obsessed poet who became as famous as America allows its poets to be and who in 1972 committed suicide by leaping from a bridge into the faculty parking lot at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis (he apparently planned to kill himself by symbolically jumping into the Mississippi River, which divides the United States east and west, but alas badly misjudged his last leap of faith or faithlessness).

Yet there is connection here. For one thing, both Hopkins and Berryman were converts to Roman Catholicism, and both strove mightily to fulfil their religious convictions - Hopkins as priest-teacher, Berryman as the willing but out-of-control alcoholic pilgrim. Both also spent some of the last years of their lives in Ireland. Hopkins, of course, living and dying at University College in Dublin."

Edward Hirsh commented that:

"In his last books Berryman spoke with unadorned directness and a certain exhibitionist glee in his wayward past. He wrote religious poems, such as "Eleven Addresses to the Lord" and "Opus Dei," in which he put himself "under new management" by embracing a "God of rescue." One felt him standing, guilt-ridden and amazed, before the eternal.

He also wrote needy, grief-stricken poems that one still returns to late at night. Such lyrics as "He Resigns," "Henry by Night," and "Henry's Understanding" have a terrifying clarity and simplicity. They have a dark vulnerability and honesty, a wounded splendor."

The first of Berryman's wonderful Eleven Addresses to the Lord can be read here.

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Lloyd Cole & The Commotions - Brand New Friend.