Since its 1953 publication, John Berryman's first long poem Homage to Mistress Bradstreet has functioned as a critically contested space. Whilst the text's contemporary reviewers praised the accuracy with which it “pierced the darkness of three hundred years” to re-create the culture of the Puritan settlers in New England,Footnote ² recent readers have sought to substantiate J. M. Linebarger's assertion that “the modern poet and his age are as important to the poem.”Footnote ³ These conflicting interpretations illuminate Homage's problematic relationship with history as it seeks to establish a dialogue with Anne Bradstreet, the first published poet of colonial North America. Berryman's self-confessed blend of fact and invention in the work aimed to forge imaginative connections between the seventeenth-century past and his postwar present. His decision to represent Bradstreet through a direct speech that modulated his own voice into hers, however, gestures simultaneously towards a deep unease regarding the reappropriation of her life by his art.

Sixty years on, Berryman's ventriloquist act in Homage continues to raise what Philip Coleman has termed “important questions concerning the strategic intertextuality of the poem and its twentieth-century interpolations.”Footnote ⁴ What were the poet's motivations for versifying Bradstreet's life and times in this fashion? And does an understanding of Homage as a text controlled and directed by his contemporary intentions contradict its status as a “historical” poem? Through providing a fresh close reading that focusses explicitly upon Berryman's complex mediation between Puritan New England and Cold War America, this paper centralizes his reconstruction of his mistress's voice, and considers the dialogue he stages between both writers as a locus of textual anxiety. His efforts to woo the ghostly Bradstreet “from the centuries” (3·3), I argue, indicate a more multifaceted context for the work's composition than is currently supposed. If the poet's portrait of one pioneer woman afforded the opportunity for a parallel critique of modern America, the homage to her remained highly metapoetic in nature. Replacing Bradstreet's “didactic rime” (12·5–12·6) with his own uncertain phrases enabled Berryman to articulate both his fierce literary ambition and his doubts regarding the possibilities for art in an age of mounting sociopolitical tensions.

Past assessments of Homage display a marked tendency to emphasize Berryman's rewriting not of Bradstreet's history but of his own as the lovesick protagonist of Berryman's Sonnets. Composed during an adulterous affair in 1947, but kept private for the next twenty years, the publication of this autobiographical sequence has reinforced prevailing opinions of the poet's work as narrowly confessional in its scope. Cast in the light of the Sonnets, the “lovers' air” (3·5) that Homage attributes to the seventeenth-century woman and the twentieth-century man is viewed by John Haffenden as a means of “treating [Berryman's] own guilt feelings” publicly.Footnote ⁵ Sarah Provost and Edward Brunner cite the poet's transposition of the phrase “I want to take you for my lover” (32·5)Footnote ⁶ from the mouth of the Sonnets' Lise to that of Bradstreet as evidence that Homage represents a “restag[ing]” of the liaison and a means of “regain[ing] the power he had lost in his humiliating affair.”Footnote ⁷ To those concerned with the full range of uses and abuses of history in the latter text, however, such biographical readings are partial in their satisfactions. As Brendan Cooper notes, their efficacy in “lock[ing] the poem into a limiting personalistic context” depends on the notion of Berryman as a reclusive solipsist uninterested in wider political and social concerns.Footnote ⁸ By contrast, a survey of the documents surrounding the poem's composition paints a very different picture, which provides a point of departure for my initial exploration of Homage: that of a man preoccupied with art's potential for social responsibility, and struggling to relate his verse to the course of national life.

Berryman's journals from early 1948 reveal him to have been overwhelmed not just by his “specific” transgression but by its “general” implications. The affair he had chronicled, he wrote, was a study in “‘possession’ & betrayal & dominatedness (so the political analogue is omnipresent).”Footnote ⁹ His lines describe a sense of oppression on multiple fronts. And he was not unqualified to speak of “the political analogue,” for by this time he was also engaged in composing a series of review articles bemoaning the modern intellectual's impotence before the Cold War's escalating tensions. In one Partisan Review piece, he commented,

Berryman's fatalism challenged the legacy of an Emerson or a Whitman, implying freethinking democracy to have been compromised by the abnegation of “individual” responsibility. In the wake of the Sonnets, his poetry seized upon these concerns: he did not hark back to lost love but sought instead to question its possibility in “an age when for many attentive to the developments of science the future has ceased to exist.”Footnote ¹¹ The year 1948 saw the first of his abortive efforts to produce a Black Book of verse detailing the Jewish genocide during the Second World War. Yet as the Red Scare spread through the streets and the Soviet Union announced its first successful nuclear test, the evidence suggests that Berryman was inured to the possibility of disaster closer to home. “The Wholly Fail” portrays a postwar (or, indeed, prewar) America facing a future of unprecedented destruction. This, however, is no McCarthyite polemic: in an emphatic politicization of the domestic arena, the destruction is borne in the hand of the paternal apothecary who doses his “own” family. The blanket gesture of protection ushers in the apocalypse that “Partsusall”:

Acknowledgement of the limitations of strictly biographical readings opens the way for more nuanced perceptions of both the personal and the national engagements that shaped the composition of Berryman's first long poem. In 1948 he would also produce the first eleven lines of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet:

In historical terms, Berryman's text locates itself securely within the New World to which Bradstreet had emigrated during the 1630 founding of the Massachusetts Bay colony. This was the story of the nation's origins as a figurative Promised Land, its significance asserted by the Word of God. The Puritan settlers were encouraged by their leaders to view history rhetorically, as a form of postdated prophecy; as Sacvan Bercovitch observes, their journey attained a retrospective symbolism, announcing the advent of “a new heaven and a new earth.”Footnote ¹³ But here, too, “the political analogue is omnipresent,” for Berryman's description of “bright eyes on the Lord” surrounded by “grand dark” is suggestive of the new church fathers' rigidly theocratic system of self-government. Promoting the marriage of rhetoric and fact, event interpreted and interpretation become event, these acts of reading underscored their Providential plan to establish a people united in space, Scripture, and spirit. Moreover, the colonists' “nationalist–universalist” visionFootnote ¹⁴ – defined by separation both from the English Stuart crown and from the New World's indigenous inhabitants – as documented by history would serve to write the American cultural narrative.

In a 1965 Shenandoah symposium, Berryman recalled Robert Lowell's assessment of Homage as “the most resourceful historical poem in our literature.”Footnote ¹⁵ The easy classification of Homage as “historical,” however, belies a prolonged struggle to define the nature of his first long poem's engagements with the past. Beginning his project, Berryman had searched in vain for contemporary models. As he saw it, the American academy's privileging of the formal, impersonal short lyric had sent the generation preceding his own “to pieces”: “Tate has published one booklet in a decade … Léonie Adams and Putnam fell silent, Louise Bogan nearly so, Van Doren and Warren developed no following … The young poets lately, in short, have had not fathers but grandfathers.”Footnote ¹⁶ When Berryman realized that he was involved in a long poem about history, it was thus natural that he should turn to the open forms of his literary “grandfathers”: The Bridge, The Cantos, Paterson, The Waste Land. Nevertheless, Brendan Cooper notes that the poet's description of his “first thoughts” regarding Homage articulates distinctly “contradictory energies of rejection and acceptance” towards his national verse tradition:Footnote ¹⁷ “let us have something spectacularly NOT The Waste Land, the best long poem of the age.” In this light, Berryman's quest to write himself into the American canon invites a reading as a simultaneous quest for self-definition through a form “at once flexible and grave, intense and quiet, able to deal with matter both high and low.”Footnote ¹⁸ His Homage, seeking to revivify the New World from the Old, would combine the monumental with the domestic and the epic with the lyric urge. If it acknowledged The Waste Land in its portrait of a bleak landscape waiting for meaning to be inscribed upon its terrain, it derived its eight-line stanza, pointedly, from the Eurocentric tradition of Yeats – “the [stanza] he adopted from Abraham Cowley for his elegy ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’.”Footnote ¹⁹

Homage, then, afforded Berryman his own opportunity to voice the difficulties of identifying with a country that encompassed the emigrant and the “anti-European,” “the happy ending” and “the Bomb.”Footnote ²⁰ Facing the end of history, he would take his cue from Perry Miller's The New England Mind, travelling back in time to interrogate the origins of his nation from the parameters of a documented past. Unlike Miller, though, he struggled to place faith in “the American republic['s] illimitable capacity for self-renewal.”Footnote ²¹ Philip Coleman and Brendan Cooper offer support for this reading, arguing that Berryman's literary reconstruction of seventeenth-century New England functions as a vehicle for his ambivalence towards contemporary America.Footnote ²² It is more seldom noted, however, that Berryman's return to the Massachusetts Bay colony in Homage also provided him with a model for the reappropriation of history. Bringing his own conflation of rhetoric and fact to bear on Helen Campbell's biography Anne Bradstreet and Her Times and first colony governor John Winthrop's Journals, the poet sought to draw critical parallels with the twentieth century. If spies and sedition divided his society, his first long poem emphasized this same “Factioning passion” (24·8) amid the Newtown settlers. Homage's first section recounts a difficult landing of “broils” and near-starvation during which the “Fangs of a wolf” (16·4) at the door were accompanied by the whispers of resentful neighbours. The tensions rising in this so-called Promised Land, Berryman implies, presented a threat to the body both as physical entity and as nascent nation-state.

Nevertheless, an understanding of Homage on these terms ensures that one question remains: why should Berryman have chosen Bradstreet specifically to voice the major part of his work? Throughout years of interviews, he would insist on her representative status “as a woman, not much as a poetess.”Footnote ²³ The text at first glance seems to substantiate his assertion; we are told that even Bradstreet's husband spares little time for her verse. The claim, though, is shaken when the contemporary poet upbraids her in Stanza 12:

He is “harassed” for Bradstreet's “fame” even as he pays it homage, bewildered by her enduring reputation. The complaint resonates with Berryman's concern during the late 1940s that “[m]y poetry has not yet made a world.”Footnote ²⁴ Where “didactic” Bradstreet met with a warm reception upon her work's publication in England, his own first full-length book, The Dispossessed, had sold just four hundred copies in its initial weeks of distribution.

In one 1970 interview, Berryman recounted his burgeoning ambitions for Homage. His first long poem was to be “the equivalent of a 500-page psychological novel.” It would “attempt … more” than The Scarlet Letter, and rival “Anna Karenina, which I think is the best portrait of a woman in world literature.”Footnote ²⁵ These comparisons are telling, for they suggest the poet's cooption of Bradstreet's voice to derive from a consciousness of her historical priority: this poor “poetess” serves as “a sort of mother to the artists and intellectuals who would follow her.”Footnote ²⁶ Though Puritan society's rigid hierarchies denied Bradstreet the freedom of Tolstoy's Anna, the 1650 publication of The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America distinguished her destiny from that of a Hester Prynne: she emerges as a woman “obnoxious to each carping tongue/who say my hand a needle better fits.”Footnote ²⁷ Furthermore, in selecting her as his mistress, Berryman was situating himself at the margins of a scholarly resurgence of interest in the literature of the New England colonies exploring not just her poetry's plain homespun qualities but its veiled expressions of dissent.Footnote ²⁸ Quoting from Bradstreet's collected works in the early stanzas of Homage, the contemporary poet assembles a compelling account of the figure whose “heart rose” (7·8) in her struggles to adapt to domestic life on the frontier, and whose subversive employment of Scripture highlighted the distance between Promised Land and reality for Newtown's “Strangers & pilgrims” (8·4). As the origin point of poetry in America, she proves a particularly apt vehicle with which to illuminate his postwar present.

Read thus, it is less surprising that Berryman's text should seek to connect its protagonists via a mutually fierce literary ambition. As the poet resurrects history, it is Bradstreet's artistic dispossession from the Massachusetts Bay colony that resonates with him most strongly. If even her husband will not listen, he insinuates, they two must be “on each other's hands,” for “Both of our worlds unhanded us” (2·7–2·8). This double-edged statement paves the way for Berryman's Bradstreet to begin speaking directly. She is aware that “Women have gone mad” under lesser pressures, yet her “Ambition mines, atrocious, in” (15·7–15·8), at odds with the selflessness required of her as God's servant and as “Simon's wife” (22·1). Our first encounter with her – reading “Sylvester” and “Quarles,” not the Bible – prefaces her declaration that her literary labours function as a “shroud”: a term alluding both to an ongoing alliance with European verse “dynasties” and to a pressing need to conceal the seditious “I” in revolt against its new and “barbarous” surroundings.

Following Stephen Matterson, we might say that these lines emphasize the extent to which “[h]istory's meaning is relational” in Homage's first section.Footnote ²⁹ Bradstreet's “quaternion” poems – four compositions of four parts apiece – pay tribute to “Her Most Honoured Father” Thomas Dudley and his work On The Four Parts of the World, whilst drawing upon additional English sources, from Raleigh's own History of the World to Quarles's Emblems. Name-checking her work thus becomes a way for Berryman to highlight the synchronicity of their efforts: Bradstreet, rewriting her Jacobean influences, is framed as a cowriter of his text and a prototype for his urge to negotiate his literary inheritance anew.

However, it may not have escaped Berryman's notice that the word “quaternion,” employed mathematically, denotes a complex number that unites real and imaginary units. The seventeenth-century Bradstreet can only serve in Homage as a national and literary point of origin. The imaginative leap of “modulat[ing]” his voice into hers, by contrast, permits her summoner to adopt the mantle of a Hawthorne or a Tolstoy, shaping her life into a “series of rebellions” directly reflective of his own disillusionment.Footnote ³⁰ When giving Bradstreet's impressions of the first months of settlement, Berryman draws upon her poem “To My Dear Children,” quoting its lines affirming trust in a Creator who “is able to/keep that I have committed to his charge” (8·7–8·8).Footnote ³¹ Yet the lacuna he inserts between her original words works simultaneously to indicate otherwise: it creates a semantic gap, erasing the terms of the covenant. These embellishments of Bradstreet's dissent are amplified when, in just four stanzas, the poet resolves a barrenness “which in fact lasted for years” into the birth of her first son, Samuel. As Ivy Schweitzer notes, Homage's reimagined parturition offers less of an accurate portrait of its mistress than “a historically specific metaphor of woman.”Footnote ³² Bradstreet's labour throes forge broader connections between the birth of history and the birth of literature, and convey an equal sense of trial on the contemporary poet's part:

Berryman's determination to establish reciprocity between the past and the present functions to foreground his creative agency in Homage. To communicate directly with Bradstreet from across the centuries, he needed to orchestrate a crisis of sufficient magnitude to threaten her ties to her new surroundings. He achieves this through the most extreme rewriting of her history yet: the recasting of Anne Hutchinson, excommunicated from the colony in 1637 for her role in its divisive antinomian crisis, as “her closest friend” (CP 147).Footnote ³³ Distressed by Hutchinson's exile, his Bradstreet withdraws from the scene in a process of disembodiment that is at once specific and highly metaphysical in nature. Berryman's notes to the poem indicate her sense of untetheredness – from time, from space, from a lost past and a hostile present – to be the catalyst for his interjection “in the fortune of an echo of her … as if she had summoned him” (CP 147). This gloss is rendered problematic, however, by a fuller examination of the first lines of their colloquy. The poet's replies echo his mistress's phrasing, but also extend her plea that he “Be kind” with further demands:

Berryman would later describe the decision “to insert me, in my own person, John Berryman, I,” into Homage as the “great exception” to “one whole plan.”Footnote ³⁴ The dialogue with Bradstreet marks an important shift in the poet's mode of engagement with her seventeenth-century corpse and written corpus. Having “unchained” the bounds of time in order to ally their perspectives, he was forced to acknowledge overtly that in this “historical poem” “a lot … [was] invented, too.”Footnote ³⁵ Though Bradstreet cautions, “You must not love me,” the two parties have entered a realm of artistic possibility from which she may concede “I do not bid you cease” (26·8). It was, therefore, appropriate that he would shape the second section of his ambivalent Homage into what several of his critics have termed a “movement of seduction.”Footnote ³⁶ As the poet's account of these stanzas to Peter Stitt suggests, his decision to “tempt” Bradstreet was a deliberate subversion of biographical events:

Recomposing her words in his mouth, he seeks to de-authorize her in a “fantasy” emphasizing his masculine literary control over the liaison: this is less an act of cowriting than a coup.Footnote ³⁸

If Berryman's commingling of fact and “fantasy” expands Homage's plot horizons, it also demonstrates the extent of his ambitions for his first long poem. In Stanza 32, Bradstreet speaks a phrase he had assigned previously to another reluctant literary paramour, “Lise” from his (as yet unpublished) 1947 Sonnets: “I want to take you for my lover” (32·5). Voicing Bradstreet, revising her past as written entity, the contemporary poet was revising his own apprentice works simultaneously. The effect is not to posit explicit connections between Puritan colony life and the suburban despairs of the Sonnets, but to incorporate both scenes within a more transhistorical vision of America. Reading Berryman's self-quotation as layering poetic progress past into a palimpsestFootnote ³⁹ of “Spring's New England” (31·1) provides one means of liberating Homage from the biographical context it is commonly afforded. This stance is consistent with the lines that follow, which replace the expected “redaction of Lise”Footnote ⁴⁰ with a song of the self's sense of rootlessness:

By the end of the stanza, the poet has constructed a new world of antinomial heights and depths for his mistress to share. Nevertheless, William J. Martz's view of it as heralding “a symbolic marriage or consummation” remains difficult to substantiate.Footnote ⁴¹ The aporia and syntactical dislocations Berryman employs in his subversion of space and time provide a disturbing intimation of the doubts that inhere within this act of seduction. Failing to integrate the vision of “Venus” at the sky's summit with that of the “hefty pike” on the ocean floor, his lines call into question their capacity to reconcile the landscapes of Puritan New England and twentieth-century America.

In his 1965 Shenandoah essay, the poet would recall that he had anticipated the key problem arising from the central dialogue of Homage: “how to make [both parties] in some measure physically present to each other.” His “tactical solution,”Footnote ⁴² he wrote, lay in one remark granted to Bradstreet, “A fading world I dust, with fingers new” (27·5). It is probable that with this line Berryman intended his readers to interpret his work's transhistorical colloquy as a celebration of the literary imagination; he would forcibly embody his mistress through Homage's body text. Yet Bradstreet's comment, located within the poem's new covenant of “lawless holds, annihilations of law” (28·5), is subject to a semantic and temporal fluidity that limits the efficacy of the approach. The description of worlds lost and worlds renewed could belong to either speaker. As the poet repeats “Lie still” (26·3–26·4) to his mistress, the words that his new pen puts in her “fading” mouth highlight the extent to which her so-called “physical … presen[ce]” depends upon his literary agency. At the crucial moment of communion, we are invited to reconsider the motivations behind this liaison. Was Berryman's decision to coopt the historical woman into his ambitious poetics a respectful nod to her artistic primacy or a calculated exploitation of her image that distorts the facts into a self-serving “Lie”?

The persistence of these questions goes some way towards justifying Berryman's claim that Homage had involved a “high and prolonged riskiness.” Stitching lines into stanzas on “an erasable, glassine-covered wax pad,”Footnote ⁴³ he had set out to resituate the origins of a nation within his own uncertain phrases. In this light, it is doubly significant that the version of Bradstreet that his text's second section conjures is one that the author of “To My Dear and Loving Husband” cannot comprehend. She is unable to recognize the self that materializes beneath the poet's gaze: “Veiled my eyes, attending. How can it be I?” (27·1). Moreover, in a striking counter to the appropriative masculine rhetoric that marks the outset of their colloquy, her reimagined body offers considerable resistance to his twentieth-century overtures. Berryman's Bradstreet – “a sobersides” (32·4), she reminds us – is increasingly fearful of the figure that urges her to transgress beyond the boundaries of her community. In the wake of his springtime love-aria, her responses affirm nothing but an irresolution composed of and composing more ambiguities, chiasmata and syntactical compressions: “– I hear a madness. Harmless I to you/am not, not I? – No” (32·6–32·7). No longer “I,” her departed historical self, she doubts her capacity to injure her summoner, though the missed beat of Berryman's three-foot line insists otherwise.

A reading of Homage receptive to the full range of ambiguities and paradoxes with which Berryman's complex history work engages opens the way for fresh investigations of the purposes served by the poem's attempted seduction. Stephen Matterson describes its growing “emphasis on the fictional” as the fulfilment of Berryman's ambition, enabling him to fall in love with “the product of his own … ability.”Footnote ⁴⁴ This reading, however, overlooks the fact that the work's departure from its source material is paralleled by the introduction of tensions that threaten the integrity of personae and text alike. In Stanza 33, the poet's voice mounts the desperate prayer, “refrain/my western lust” (33·1–33·2). He has rewritten Bradstreet's past and his present into a transhistorical palimpsest, yet remains, like the speaker of Eliot's The Waste Land, able to connect nothing with nothing. The anticipated triumph has become a chaotic “drowning” in four centuries' past:

These “Wan dolls” are identified in Berryman's notes as Byzantine icons – figures that have endured through ages of conflict and upheaval. Calling on them at this point in the text might, then, be seen as a vehicle for the intimation that his Bradstreet can manifest no comparable presence. The poet's inability to distinguish the fantasy woman he has created is expressed further through a metaphor that amplifies Stanza 31's antinomies. Our menacing seducer has been replaced by a disoriented deep-sea diver unable to “sight” his reluctant, airy mistress; a shift that prefigures a fundamental loss of faith in his ability to maintain control over the scene.

These lines position the increasing transparency of Berryman's fictive seduction as a precursor to its outright failure, in a volte-face that has important consequences for Homage. Though his Bradstreet urges “Straiten me on” (33·8), the disintegration of their colloquy prompts the poet's turn to more serious matters than adultery, imagined or real. Losing Bradstreet temporarily, he has also lost his ability to rewrite the past at will:

Berryman's faltering phrases heap one horrific subordinate clause upon another, extending the limits of the bearable. His first long poem has evolved into a palimpsestic vision of the American Nightmare: a vision that, he later explained, “would drive anybody out of his skull, anybody who is at all responsive.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Stanza 34 may thus be read as the climax of the poet's realization that not all of history is vulnerable to seduction. Researching his Black Book project four years earlier, he had faltered when faced with a narrative resistant to interpretation or resolution.Footnote ⁴⁶ His efforts to redefine the terms of his engagement with his country and literary tradition in Homage were to write him into a record of civil and international conflict that could not be romanticized away. As he confronts his own responsibility for “the bodies, on the iron bars” – the brutality of his fellow men to which he has implicitly consented – the effect is to reinforce his sense of isolation.

The poet's awakening to the limitations of his ambition in Homage ushers in a new understanding of where his quest to transcend his nation's “Factioning passion” (24·8) has led him. He acknowledges himself as a divided individual playing out both parts of his text's dialogue: “a man of griefs & fits/trying to be my friend” (35·5–35·6). These lines are significant, for they suggest a secondary motive for Berryman's ventriloquism that illuminates the poem's final section. Whilst the woman he conjures lacks the bravado of Lise from the Sonnets, as a proto-American and a proto-poet she represents one version of his dissatisfied self. Projecting his voice into her mouth, then, can be viewed as a means of exposing her ultimate function: Sarah Provost observes that the contemporary poet's fear of unwitting violence might in this fashion be “transformed into the more acceptable form of self-destruction.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Rewriting Bradstreet as a “friend,” it seems, has prevented Berryman from befriending himself, from shedding his “griefs & fits” through the assumption of a coherent identity able to bear up to its historical and social responsibilities. Read in this light, Homage must function as a bleak warning: if coopting this mistress's voice can facilitate no true concord, such friendship is only possible through putting her to death. Stanza 35 renders the matricidal impulse explicit:

With these lines, the dialogue with Bradstreet is over, and the stage set for a return to the documented events of her “illness, loss, and age.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The third part of Homage sees the contemporary poet's voice fade out as his former mistress reanchors herself within the domestic minutiae of colony existence. Her prayers for mercy have been answered, and the impulse towards transgression washed away like dish-soap down a sink. Though Bradstreet still protests the blows of Providence's “Dark Angel” (47·5), these thirteen stanzas summon vividly the ageing author of “Meditations Divine and Moral” who has discovered “daily domestic experience [to be] correlated with spiritual truths.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Nevertheless, Berryman's continued proffering of Bradstreet's “heart” – the organ whose rebellious risings first compelled him to ally their perspectives from beyond the centuries – demonstrates his reluctance to abandon her scene. His line underscores her centrality to the American verse tradition: she is the beating heart at the heart of his ambivalence towards his country and his literary inheritance. Rewriting her voice into an ambitious transhistorical dialogue has failed to shield his eyes from the wreckage of the American Dream. His inability to access the real woman, however, points towards a modified presentation of history in the poem. It emerges not as a series of unpalatable facts to be transcended, but as a commentary upon the mechanisms by which America has read and interpreted itself as nation-state. If, as Alan Golding notes, engaging with “the margin” permits Berryman to “insert … himself at the center” in Homage,Footnote ⁵⁰ the consequence is a redefinition of this “center” as a space containing not just the words of the victors, but all that has been excluded and forgotten in efforts to construct a linear and usable past.

This movement is evinced most clearly when, in a striking contrast to her earlier rebellions, the deaths of her father and daughter cement Bradstreet's linguistic claim upon America: “This our land has ghosted with/our dead: I am at home” (44·6–44·7, emphasis added). The dead are doomed to remain fading ghosts, yet the loss establishes roots for the living that pay them homage. The motif is extended with an image of an elderly Bradstreet whose deathbed “gives on the graves” outside (51·1). She attributes to her failing, fleshy heart a “redskin calm” native to its adopted land:

It would be absurd to describe this stanza as a strictly “factual” representation of Bradstreet's voice. But the poet's words here suggest that he is less concerned with using her world to illuminate his contemporary situation than he is with locating himself within a broader tradition of attempts to situate the past within a rhetorical framework shaped by present-day anxieties – a tradition encapsulating such disparate examples as the Puritan plan for resettlement, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and Charles Olson's Maximus Poems. Whilst his Bradstreet believes that after her death “holiness on horses' bells shall stand,” the allusion to Zechariah 14 is also a pointed reminder that this is the book of the Lord's promise to “smite all the people that have fought against Jerusalem.”Footnote ⁵¹ The parenthetical aside “how many burned?” (51·2) that Berryman permits her becomes the locus for a series of oblique gestures towards not only the Newtown settlers' hardships but the persecution of Native American “redskins” that followed this “invasion of white colonials”;Footnote ⁵² it provides a veiled acknowledgement of the multiple identity claims subsumed within the American progress narrative.

Homage's late portrait of American history as metahistory casts a critical light upon the elaborate four-stanza coda with which Berryman inters his mistress. Wreathed as she is in “shadow,” what legacy can this distant figure bequeath to the postwar artist and his age? In Stanza 54 his voice returns to the forefront:

Standing at the “edge” of the word “use” – in its various senses of church ritual, employment and the lands held by Bradstreet's beneficiaries – the contemporary poet regards his national inheritance with agonized regret. His world is one in which fading headstones “stagger” under the weight of centuries past:

Berryman's elegiac tone reduces all of the learning that has gone into his text to “a closet of secrets dying.” Relinquishing the fantasy of communion with Bradstreet's voice has served merely to reinforce his awareness of the fractures and losses that neither poetry nor history can reconcile. The old New World he depicts in which “races” murder and multiply and Stanza 1's “foxholes” hold crouching soldiers offers a revised palimpsest of his nation's contribution to multiple and unmitigated atrocities: epidemics of disease, wars civil and international, the failure to prevent acts of genocide.

Berryman's capacity for social critique via Homage's history work, then, must be situated within his sense of powerlessness before America's encroaching fate.Footnote ⁵³ Despite lacking the authority of the Puritan forefathers, it is his voice that concludes the poem by presenting an alternative prophecy for the nation. The poet's earlier depiction of Bradstreet's demise as a series of “yellowing days” in which “faces wholly fail” (53·1) gestures self-consciously towards “The Wholly Fail,” the 1950 poem with which he had articulated his fears of nuclear destruction. These allusions to her past and his present coalesce in Stanza 55's heavy, sluggish alexandrine, “reactor piles wage slow upon the wet brain rime” (55·8). Unable to seduce or to transcend the competing histories that press unchecked upon him, Berryman can only juxtapose his mistress's lost past with his nation's lost future. The indelible image of the “wounded flying” (55·5) is his narrative's event interpreted and its interpretation become event. Contemporary history in Homage stands as a grimly postdated prophecy in which the “wet brain rime” of Bradstreet's fatal illness serves as the precursor to the endless frost of nuclear winter.

In his seminal article “Nightmares of Eden,” Philip Coleman observes that Homage represents an ethical interrogation “of the American self and the nation's difficult history.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Whilst this is demonstrably the case, it has yet to be noted that the work's final stanzas evince a simultaneous interrogation of the agency and function of the historical poem. Berryman's preoccupation with his own legacy and his doubts regarding the poet's enduring public role imbue these lines with a distinct irony. His voice alone has summoned Bradstreet and played out both parts of their dialogue; in claiming authority over her past, he is his text's sole authority. Yet as he “must pretend to leave” his literary lover,Footnote ⁵⁵ the phrasing provides a wry reminder of the fictive basis of his stance:

The poet is forced to concede of his mistress

The immortality granted to Bradstreet by Berryman's text is dependent upon his ambition to travel “back along the ancient lines of advance”Footnote ⁵⁶ – the same ambition that his 1949 essay “The Poetry of Ezra Pound” had traced admiringly from Dryden and Milton through Eliot, Pound and Yeats. In Homage, however, the consequence is a redefinition of “forever” as the eternally uncertain. The poem closes with the disturbing insinuation that the future of American literature (and, by extension, the future of America itself) has become conditional, existing “so long as I happen” and so long as the superpowers refrain from violent action on their citizens' behalf.

A recognition of Homage as a work fully voiced by Berryman, and reflective of his twentieth-century exigencies, thus levies certain charges of egotism upon him. Attempting to cement Bradstreet within the American verse tradition, his primary aim was to cement his presence beside her; his first long poem afforded him the opportunity to rewrite not just her “didactic rime” (12·6) but his own apprentice works, entering into dialogue with his modernist “grandfathers.” Nevertheless, the poem's furtherance of “the political analogue”Footnote ⁵⁷ he had observed retrospectively in his Sonnets opens the way for readings that might facilitate his partial exoneration. In its dual status as product and critique of the American progress narrative, Homage can be understood more accurately as a diagnostic survey: the failure of Berryman's ambition enabled him to write the psychogeography of a nation. The text's coda equates Bradstreet's dispersed mortal remains with all that remains of American history as a coherent, stable and linear entity: “fire-ash, fossils, burled/in the open river-drifts” (56·5–56·6) of the old New World from which the contemporary poet strives to reclaim it. One function of this reading is to expose the inadequacy of interpretations that continue to present Berryman's dialogue with Bradstreet as an exact redaction of his 1947 affair. Furthermore, it provides a foundation for a reassessment of his engagements with wider society that places new emphasis upon his oeuvre's concern with the artist's public status. Homage's agonized interrogation of the desire to identify with a usable past cements Berryman's reputation as the practitioner of a poetics in which “[l]iterary or imaginative sensibility is not only a necessary adjunct to moral and political philosophy but also its paradoxical and fractured ground.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The poem's story of “lawless holds” (28·5) is the story of America's struggle for self-definition, and the story of that struggle's cost.

The narrow confessional designation of Homage might in this light be replaced by an interpretative model that locates the poet's cultural work upon two parallel stages. If Berryman's poem explores the sociopolitical legacy of the American Dream, it pays homage simultaneously to his fierce desire for literary success. It could be said that at the time of composition his fears of nuclear conflict and social collapse were matched by his fears of artistic insignificance, and that these anxieties were addressed by the attempt to write himself into the American body text. This revised perception of Homage suggests a closer relation to Berryman's mature works, including 1964's “Formal Elegy” and his second long poem, The Dream Songs, than is currently supposed.Footnote ⁵⁹ The poet's reappropriation of Bradstreet's voice might be viewed as a prototype for Henry's adoption of various marginalized personae and a tentative gesture towards the Songs' metapoetic awareness of their own critical reception. Considered thus, the case is strengthened for an investigation of Berryman's construction of poetic identity that foregrounds his personae's capacity to respond to the flux of history and the flux of literary ambition alike. More broadly, too, reading Homage as a vindication of Berryman's public self-positioning points hopefully towards a new generation of comparative studies.Footnote ⁶⁰ The work's contradictory urges to belong and to revolt, to commemorate what is canonical and to forge the canon anew, have yet to be contextualized within his identification with the American epic tradition that runs from Whitman through Pound, Williams, Ginsberg and Olson.

After completing Homage in 1953, Berryman wrote to Allen Tate that he had come to regard “every word” of its text of national beginnings and endings as “either a murderer or a lover.”Footnote ⁶¹ The statement resonates beyond plot summary, for it also implies that his failure to rewrite his mistress's history represented a landmark achievement in his career. Homage's division of his uncertain postwar “I” from Bradstreet's fading ghost articulates national and literary anxieties that reach back to The Dispossessed and pave the way towards the “irreversible loss”Footnote ⁶² suffered by Henry in The Dream Songs. It is surprising, then, that so few of Berryman's critics should recognize the all-American nature of its engagements with history: his first long poem tells the story of a Promised Land which had broken all of its promises.