Dream Song: Interview with John Plotz

John Berryman

Dream Song: Interview with John Plotz
__________________

“It's personality—it's Henry”
—John Berryman,
Interview with John Plotz
Harvard Advocate Oct. 27, 1968
_____________

I called The Dream Songs—
One poem rather than a group of poems
In the same form for a couple of reasons

It's personality, it's Henry—
Henry thought up all these things
over all the years arguing with Miss Eliot
__________________

Henry had this strong disagreement—
With Eliot's line—the impersonality of poetry
An idea which he got partly from Keats

From Keats letter to his 2 brothers—
Promulgating Negative Capability Lit
Something that’s been misinterpreted
__________________

Negative Capability, that is, when—
A man is capable of being in uncertainties,
Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching

After fact and reason (e.g. Coleridge)—
Instead letting go by an extra-fine isolated
Verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium
__________________

The Penetralium of mystery—
Being capable of remaining content with
Half-knowledge and just letting go

Letting the poet’s sense of Beauty—
Overcome every other consideration and
Holding onto that Thread of Verisimilitude
_________________

Poetry comes out of Personality—
I’m thinking of "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"
I'm thinking of that as well as Hopkins

Any one of the Hopkins sonnets—
Making the eighteenth century far from
Being impersonal but rather just the opposite