In a recent poem the US poet Mark Doty sees an apparition “in the window/ of the Eros Diner, corner/ of 21st Street”. The ghost is a bespectacled figure, heavy-bearded, eating alone. In the poem Doty swears the apparition is John Berryman, the US poet who committed suicide at the age of 57 in January 1972, jumping from the Washington Bridge in Minneapolis on to the frozen banks of the Mississippi.
Doty is not the only one to be haunted by Berryman. Anyone who dips into his extraordinary poems is likely to find his voice, and his presence, hard to shake off. Berryman is often described as one of the founders of “confessional poetry”, part of that brilliant but doomed generation (Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton) who made searing poetry from the intimate details of their lives, and paid a high price for doing so. Berryman, however, dismissed the term: “The word doesn’t mean anything. I understand the confessional to be a place where you go and talk with a priest. I personally haven’t been to confession since I was 12 years old.”