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 "John Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1953) is a curious kind of homage. Berryman dismisses Bradstreet’s poetry, exclaiming, ‘[A]ll this bald / abstract didactic rhyme I read appalled’ (stanza 12, lines 5–6). Later he has Bradstreet herself lament how the ‘proportioned, spiritless poems accumulate’ (42.6), a sentiment which echoes her admission of defeat at line three thousand five hundred and sixty four of ‘The Four Monarchies’. Her physical person is equally unprepossessing: ‘pockmarked and westward standing on a haggard deck’ (4.5) she appears to him in his vision, her ‘cratered skin’ like her ‘Palissey ewer’, as he later has her refer to it (28.1), corresponding to her poetry’s lack of smoothness and beauty. The picture Berryman presents of this seventeenth century poet is of a writer commanding neither the fire of the great Renaissance dramatists (a quality to which Berryman aspired, as his early pseudonym, Alan Fury, indicates), nor the melody of a Sidney or a Spenser; a poor ambassador of the great Renaissance verse of England." |
