“We Want Anti-models”: John Berryman's Eliotic Inheritance

In his study Modern Poetry after Modernism, James Longenbach criticizes the lingering critical perception of the postmodernist development in poetry as a “breakthrough” narrative that rebelled against the traditionalism and impersonality of Eliotic modernism. As he points out, postmodern poets in fact confronted Eliot via a series of intricate and ambivalent interactive processes that are not confinable within this “breakthrough” narrative. In this paper, I use Longenbach's argument as a starting point for a re-examination of Eliot's influence on the major poetry of one of his more apparently vocal opponents: John Berryman. Berryman's attitude towards Eliot was radically ambivalent, based on an idea that poetic predecessors must become “anti-models,” figures whom the contemporary poet can only incorporate through productive gestures of reaction against them. In the light of this idea, I show that in Berryman's major works, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and The Dream Songs, Eliot exerts a far stronger and more significant influence than has hitherto been recognized. My discussion of Berryman's participation in a postwar “Eliotic inheritance” allows for readings of these two poets that are not dependent upon crude oppositions between the “impersonal” and the “personal”. And as a consequence it opens the way for richer and more nuanced readings of Berryman's work as well as for invigorating reassessments of Eliot's own verse and his influence on twentieth-century poetry.