History and Seduction

Abstract

In reviewing 77 Dream Songs Lowell looked back over Berryman’s career and wrote that Homage to Mistress Bradstreet was ‘the most resourceful historical poem in our literature’.¹ This claim might appear odd, seeming to reflect Lowell’s own preoccupation with history rather than any prominent feature of Berryman’s work. But there is a lot of truth in the idea. While Homage is original and challenging in many ways, it is most astonishing in the relationship it creates between Berryman and Anne Bradstreet, between the present and the past; or, to put it in Lowell’s terms, between historian and resource. It is not just an attitude to history, but an attitude also to time, loss and writing, since historiography involves these. Homage, the Dream Songs and History are intensely concerned with time, loss and writing, and the ideas and attitudes examined in these works represent the fullest poetic development of Berryman and Lowell.

history is inaccessible to us except in textual form

(Jameson, The Political Unconscious)

You’re gone; I am learning to live in history.

What is history? What you cannot touch.

(Lowell, ‘Mexico’)

out of the maize and air

your body’s made, & moves. I summon, see from the centuries it. I think you won’t stay.

I think you won’t stay.

(Berryman, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet)