You Can Never Be Sure

Abstract If you had to name the genre of The Selected Letters of John Berryman, how many different answers could you give? This essay considers a handful of approaches to reading poets’ correspondence and to the particularly disordered case of Berryman’s letters. After reading the letters the predominant way we approach modern poets’ correspondence today—as an assemblage of documentary evidence that stands alongside but not in place of a biography—this essay proposes a fruitful alternative: to focus less on their sender and more on their addressees. In that broader light, The Selected Letters is the best book ever assembled on what John Berryman needed from, and could provide for, anyone who wasn’t John Berryman. The remainder of the essay surveys what Berryman offered several generations of poets, from peers like Elizabeth Bishop, to near-contemporaries like Adrienne Rich, to poets working today. What many contemporary poets have found most useful—and most objectionable—in his work may be a permission-granting hostility, which they have wrested away and turned back on Berryman himself. After speculating about lessons we could take from Berryman’s example, this essay concludes on a central question raised by his tumultuous reception: how can you ever be sure?