“Dream Song 187Them lady poets must not marry, pal.Miss Dickinson—fancy in Amherst bedding hér.Fancy a lark with Sappho,a tumble in the bushes with Miss Moore,a spoon with Emily, while Charlotte glare.Miss Bishop’s too noble-O.That was the lot. And two of them are hereas yet, and—and: Sylvia Plath is not.She—she her credentialshas handed in, leaving alone two totsand widower to what he makes of it—surviving guy, &when Tolstoy’s pathetic widow doing her whung(after them decades of marriage) & kids, she decided he was queer& loving his agent.Wherefore he rush off, leaving two journals, & die.It is a true error to marry with poetsor to be by them.”

“Them lady poets must not marry, pal.”

“What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,What, what is he to do? I saw it goMerrily bouncing, down the street, and thenMerrily over-there it is in the water!”

“ Two daiquiriswithdrew into a corner of a gorgeous roomand one told the other a lie.”

“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. All the world like a woolen lover once did seem on Henry's side. Then came a departure. Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought. I don't see how Henry, pried open for all the world to see, survived. What he has now to say is a long wonder the world can bear & be. Once in a sycamore I was glad all at the top, and I sang. Hard on the land wears the strong sea and empty grows every bed.”

“…Henry is tired of winter,& haircuts, & a squeamish comfy ruin-prone proud national mind, & Spring (in the city so called)Henry likes Fall.Hé would be prepared to líve in a world of Fállfor ever, impenitent Henry.But the snows and summers grieve and dream;These fierce & airy occupations, and love,raved away so many of Henry’s yearsit is a wonder that, with in each handone of his own mad books and all,ancient fires for eyes, his head full& his heart full, he's making ready to move on.”

“No, I didn't. But I was aware that I was embarked on an epic. In the case of the Bradstreet poem, I didn't know. The situation with that poem was this. I invented the stanza in '48 and wrote the first stanza and the first three lines of the second stanza, and then I stuck. I had in mind a poem roughly the same length as another of mine, “The Statue”—about seven or eight stanzas of eight lines each. Then I stuck. I read and read and read and thought and collected notes and sketched for five years until, although I was still in the second stanza, I had a mountain of notes and draftings—no whole stanzas, but passages as long as five lines. The whole poem was written in about two months, after which I was a ruin for two years. When I finally got going, I had this incredible mass of stuff and a very good idea of the shape of the poem, with the exception of one crucial point, which was this. I'll tell you in a minute why and how I got going. The great exception was this: It did not occur to me to have a dialogue between them—to insert bodily Henry into the poem . . . Me, to insert me, in my own person, John Berryman, I, into the poem . . .”