“Some / would like you to make room, / mother . . .”: On Mothers and sons in John Berryman’s The Dream Songs

Abstract

This article closely reads John Berryman’s song 14 of The Dream Songs, and argues that confessional poetry is steeped in mother-son drama, although not what critics and readers have traditionally thought of as strictly oedipal. this article applies Jessica Benjamin’s model of intersubjectivity to explore the poet’s identification with and differentiation from the mother figure; furthermore, it borrows from adam Phillips and D. W. Winnicott to discuss how ideas about motherhood play into Berryman’s poetic self-fashioning. in song 14, Berryman asserts the poet’s need to banter with the mother and so discover the writing self as paradoxically reactionary and autonomous. By looking at one aspect of confessional poetry, the writer’s fundamental relationship to his mother, this article argues for a rethinking of the seemingly masculine poetics of John Berryman. it discusses the ways in which not only Berryman but robert lowell as well collaborate with their mothers, represent motherhood as transcending gender and biology, and suggest that mothers and ideas about mothers play into poetic self-fashioning. this article contributes to an understanding of confessional writing as self-exploratory, uncertain of its own status, and mediated by analysts, parents, and texts, rather than as titillating self-disclosure.