Devine and Kirsch are in relative agreement that to consider Berryman a poet of the Confessional school is at once misguided, and derivative of a merely topical analysis of his life's work; particularly his magnum opus, The Dream Songs.
While the chapter on Berryman in Kirsch's The Wounded Surgeon is somewhat organized biographically or, perhaps, just chronologically; it is less focally the former than what I'd imagine other critics' analyses of the author.
Even though The Wounded Surgeon also asserts that, along with Berryman, neither Lowell or Plath are truly Confessional poets, I would place Berryman even farther from the leftist pole in the Confessional-Denial (?) continuum than, say, Sylvia Plath; whom I haven't read quite as much of as Berryman and Lowell, whose works are (as little/much as I know) far more impersonal, labyrinthine, and opaque/vague in its connection to the authors. I mean, "At twenty I tried to die"? C'mon. But enough about ole Sylvia.
As a side note, a class on the conception/evolution of the "I" in poetry would be interesting, spanning from the Romantics to the Confessionals, say, or all the way to now. I may have mentioned this before, but it's obvious, this flip-flopping, Oedipal killing of the father and near-adoption of the grandfather, so to speak.
Also, Personism: there's an obvious difference between the Cs and Ps, in content and style, but both have that Return of the "I" (Jedi, heh) going on. Were they separated geographically and/or academically, because they seem to overlap if not completely coincide? Anyway.
Devine and Kirsch heavily consider Berryman as a protagonist and an antagonist of the Modernist aesthetic, perhaps respectively. The former reads (I think) The Dream Songs as a kind of allegory for The Fall (from Eden) in which "the poetic project at hand is nothing less than an attempt to replace that tree from which the poet originally fell." In reality, this fall was/is a vestigial symptom of modernity which would inevitably emerge from remission via The Dream Songs, making it clear that the "problems of subjectivity and 'impersonality'" never really went away; that is, they're perpetual concerns for the artistic and spiritual self in the modern and postmodern world.
Despite these problems, "Berryman's authorial consciousness is wider than the consciousness of Henry" ("the author has a wider perspective and greater wisdom than his creation"), which is made evident by the voice of reason that is Mr. Bones: an authorial stand-in whose commentaries are composed of voices that are and aren't the timbre of Berryman's own voice. Instead, "the madness that Berryman accesses through his poems is the violence and repression of the American people," making The Dream Songs less personal/Confessional, and more social in scope.
(O these damn "critical" non sequiturs! Having a hard time taking a step back and taking it all in and getting/keeping it all down.)
Somehow I think these Songs were all meant to funnier; that their heaviness is regarded as such only due to and/or in light of Berryman's own life. I see Henry as a kind of Brian a la Monty Python's Life of Brian. He was forsaken in that he was screwed out the position of being forsaken; he's the Nobody to Everyman. And, Mr. Bones, as I've said, is the authorial stand-in/stand-up comedian to Henry's self-destruction—a Job, but in a godless world.
However, Mr. Bones's facetious attitude toward a self-pitying Henry is righteous in that while white-male Henry was elected to a position in the tree from which he was able to fall, the presumably black Mr. Bones wasn't even allowed entry, much less a tree-climb, unless he was being chased by "flashlights, & barks, and [...] guns" (DS 57).
It is also worth noting that Berryman didn't like Henry—he even hated his name—and so, why would he create a character in his image, so to spark. Anyway, maybe Mr. Bones is more major a character than we think, maybe? Or, to suggest the most overused idea—multiple personality disorder—maybe they're the same person! Just kidding.
While Berryman's allusions to The Fall, as iterated by Devine, is legitimate, the fact that Berryman was somewhat antagonistic to the concept of God—i.e. until the end of his life—one must question the nature of his allusion to The Fall: was it meant to be austerely regarded or facetiously so?
And how interesting (and oddly poetic) it is that it was a fall that killed Berryman, however instantly, and The Fall that killed Henry, though over time. I think Berryman's Henry is a/the bridge (heh, how punny) between modernism and postmodernism: in his struggle to assert a poetic and spiritual self, and the reconciliation "to the limits of his art and the loss in his world," a world without God yet filled with secular consequence nonetheless. To fall from the sycamore and hit every branch on the way down is to be human, of which Henry takes full advantage by aiming for each and every branch.
(Meant to use your paper and Kirsch more but didn't want to just regurgitate them at you; plus, didn't know where to begin.)
Another idea: Henry + Mr. Bones = double-consciousness.
