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Compare, contrast and draw connections between the poets Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell and John Berryman and their poems. Do this in relation to larger trends in post-1945 poetry.

It has often been noted that literature and art reflect the cultural and geographic climates in which they are produceda statement that holds true to this day. However, a significant change took root in the years after World War II: a tendency for artists, particularly poets, to look inward, and to incorporate their own experiences into their art. This style, which is sometimes referred to as confessional, is one of the strongest bonds linking the work of American poets Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and Theodore Roethke.

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Jarrell, Berryman, and Roethke are often considered to be part of a subgenre of Postmodernism known as the school of Confessional Poets. This informal group includes a number of writers who came into prominence during the period of change and upheaval that followed World War II; Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Delmore Schwartz are among the literary greats who are often associated with this school.

Though the writing styles and imagery of Jarrell, Berryman, and Roethke are often very different, the confessional nature of their poetry can certainly be seen in close readings of their work. By examining Jarrell's Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, as well as verses from Berryman's Dream Song #1 and Roethke's My Papa's Waltz, this paper will show some of the similarities, as well as some of the differences, that these poets have. In addition, the parallels in their personal lives also draw these three very different writers together.

Much of the poetry of this time period was very much influenced by the war. Nowhere is this more evident than in the work of Randall Jarrell, who was involved in the war effort himself as an instructor (Perkins 1987). According to Richard Fein, Jarrell's well-known war poem, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, itself summarizes and utilizes the major concerns and motifs of Jarrell's war poetry (Fein 1961).

And indeed, a close reading of the first two lines of this brief but compelling poem elicits powerful images: From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, / And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. This maternal reference juxtaposed with the mention of the State seems significant indeed: the conjoining of the personal (my mother) with the current condition of the world (the State) lends these lines a poignancy that can be seen as intimately personal as well as strongly political.

The confessional nature of this poem is more strongly suggested in the next two lines: Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, / I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. As the gunner is loosed from the dream of life, he finds himself in the darkness of black flak, at the mercy of nightmare fighters. It is a dark world view, full of a sense of futility and fear.

Indeed, the poem culminates with this nightmarish final line: When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. The humiliation and degradation implied in this powerful last line may be seen as cathartic and confessional. The line is also harshly elegiac, as Thomas Travisano points out, noting that Jarrell's war elegies break radically and finally with the traditional pastoral elegies: they increase rather than shed complexity . . . Jarrell implies the difficulty of achieving mature recognition of one's condition amidst the accelerating cycles of postmodern life.

Jarrell is not alone in his references to dreams. The Dream Songs, the series for which John Berryman is arguably best known, include a collection of over four hundred poems published over several years (77 Dream Songs, the first collection, won the Pulitzer in 1965). These poems include a dialogue between two protagonists, Henry and a friend, who are drawn from the American minstrel genre (Vendler 1995). Each dream song, says Vendler:

(with very few exceptions) eighteen lines long, and is divided into three six-line irregularly rhyming stanzasan isometric form one might associate, looking backward, with Berryman's debt to the meditative Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet sequences or, looking forward to the therapeutic fifty minutes, with the, inflexible and anecdotal psychiatric hour.

Hence Berryman's work, though clearly drawing on traditional poetic forms, is also very forward-looking.

Travisano also points out that John Berryman's Dream Songs emerged out of a period of intensive dream analysis for Berryman. This further suggests that these poems are confessional in nature, as Berryman draws on his analysis experience to enrich his work. The confessional nature of Berryman's Dream Songs may be all that these poems have in common with Jarrell's. The Dream Songs veer sharply in word choice and syntax, as seen in Dream Song #1:

Huffy Henry hid the day,

unappeasable Henry sulked.

I see his point,--a trying to put things over.

It was the thought that they thought

they could do it made Henry wicked & away.

But he should have come out and talked.

The repetition of words, as well as the playfully engaging word arrangements, stylistically separate Berryman's poetry from Jarrell's as much as the confessional nature unites them. Berryman's pauses, or spaces between words, as in the words hid and the in the first line of the verse, are another noticeable difference: even the visual appearance of the lines on the page are distinct.

In stark contrast to both these poets, the work of Theodore Roethke draws heavily on nature. Karl Malkoff suggests that the greenhouse land of Roethke's father and uncle provided a setting particularly suitable to the development of these esthetic ends. But, Malkoff continues:

the most important reason Roethke chose to write a sequence of poems about this vegetable realm is probably far less complex: as the scene of his childhood, it was a world highly charged with experience and significance. It was, as we have seen, both fertile womb and rigid principle of order imposed upon chaos, both heaven and hell; it was nature and society, mother and father. It was all of life.

The green world represents the safety and insecurity of childhood for Roethke.

Though this suggests a stylistic departure from both Jarrell and Berryman, the confessional aspect remains apparent, as seen here in the first stanza of My Papa's Waltz:

The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy.

The evenness of the stanza, which remains consistent throughout without an exact rhyme in the first and third lines, a slant rhyme in the second and fourthoffers a sense of rhythmic comfort which is often lacking in the work of Jarrell and Berryman.

It may be argued that his work is far more accessible than Berryman's, and far less disturbing than Jarrell's. Charles Molesworth notes that Roethke's work doesn't fit into any neat categorization of contemporary poetry, in part because he wasn't interested in theory and hence took little concern with groups or schools of poets He goes on to point out that Roethke's work drew on traditional poetry as well as on integration of modern currentsanother way in which he is similar to Berryman.

The lives of these poets also draws them together, as all three were plagued by periods of depression, and all three were treated, sometimes hospitalized, for these depressions. Jarrell was plagued by nervous exhaustion in his mature years, and there is at least one documented suicide attempt. In addition, it has often been speculated that his death, although legally recorded as an automobile accident, may actually have been a suicide.

Berryman is in fact known to have committed suicide, by throwing himself off a bridgea sad and harsh death which followed a lifetime of alcoholism, womanizing, and paralyzing bouts of depression.

Only Roethke seems to have escaped a similar fate; in fact, he seems to have been the only one to draw on the negative experiences of his past depressions and to have used them as tools for self-introspection and growth.

Another way in which the careers of these three poets coincideand a much more positive oneis that despite the personal unhappiness that may have plagued them throughout their lives, each enjoyed a certain amount of recognition for his talents and achievements. And each, certainly, has had a lasting impact on the evolution of poetry.

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