Verse Before Vows?

In a review of Poets in Their Youth, Eileen Simpson’s 1982 memoir of her marriage to John Berryman, Lisa Levy contemplates what inspired the poet and his contemporaries Robert Lowell and Delmore Schwartz – and what drove them apart from their spouses:

To get an idea about how important poetry was to these men — not their wives, who significantly seemed to tolerate the poetry talk rather than participate in it — it’s best to think about if the World Series, the Superbowl, the Stanley Cup, and the NBA Playoffs all happened at the same time with teams like Milton, Yeats, Eliot, and Shakespeare competing.

Randall Jarrell was fond of a game called The Best Three, which he made his fellow poets play obsessively — the best three lines of Milton, of the “The Waste Land,” of Lear, etc. Reading about it in Simpson reminded me of how my friends and I were about music in the 1980s: What’s the best live band you’ve ever seen? Best Stones record? Best UK Punk band before the Clash? Current band from Minneapolis? Band to ever play CBGBs? But while we were obsessed with the new, the poets were wildly concerned with lineages, through lines from the Elizabethans to the Romantics to the Moderns to themselves. The theory is that the generation before — Yeats, Eliot, Pound — would be sure to overshadow this one, no matter how hard Berryman, Schwartz, Jarrell, and Lowell wrote. But that was wrong. If they wrote hard, though, they lived harder, and were extremely hard to live with. It’s not shocking that they took mistresses and to the bottle: poetry was the only thing they could be faithful to.

This was a pivotal time in poetry, and they were the first generation of “professional poets,” a class made possible by MFA programs, generous fellowships, and an actual reading public (as well as popular public readings). Yet despite all of this machinery, the idea of the poet maudit, roaming the streets composing verse about lost loves and sad lives, possessed them. Does it follow that they were then cursed with lost loves and sad lives? One of their constant arguments was about poetry as a vocation versus poetry as work, which seems a false dichotomy. Doesn’t it have to be both?