dream songs

after he thought he had finished 'dream songs',
berryman wrote more; about 40 are collected in the
posthumous volume, 'henry's fate'.

and this is sort of pertinent to a recent thread:

INTERVIEWER: In The Dream Songs there is a passage
about assistant professors becoming associate
professors by working on your poems. How do you feel
about being cannon fodder for aspiring young critics
and graduate students?

BERRYMAN: As for the graduate students, some of the
work they do is damned interesting. A woman somewhere
in the South did an eighty-page thesis investigating
the three little epigraphs to the 77 Dream Songs and
their bearing on the first three books of the poem. I
must say that her study was exhaustive?very little
left to be found out on that subject! But it's good,
careful work. I take a pleased interest in these
things, though there is ineptness and naiveté, and
they get all kinds of things wrong and impute to me
amazing motives. Another woman thought I was
influenced by Hebrew elegiac meter. Now, my Hebrew is
primitive, and I don't even know what Hebrew elegiac
meter is?and, moreover, neither does she. It's a
harmless industry. It gets people degrees. I don't
feel against it and I don't feel for it. I sympathize
with the students.

The professional critics, those who know what the
literary, historical, philosophical, and theological
score is, have not really gone to work yet, and may
not do so for a long time yet. I did have a letter
once from a guy who said: "Dear Mr. Berryman, Frankly
I hope to be promoted from assistant professor to
associate professor by writing a book about you. Are
you willing to join me in this unworthy endeavor?" So
I joined him. I answered all his questions. I
practically flew out to pour out his drinks while he
typed.

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Received on Tue Dec 10 17:24:28 2002