Reading and rereading these essays [in The Freedom of the Poet]. I am struck forcibly by their consistency of attitude and expression, and by their interrelatedness, even though they were written over a period of three decades, some as lectures, some for a college textbook, others as introductions, another to be broadcast over the radio. The style can be muscular, dense with clauses and parentheses, occasionally self-indulgent—as in the famous, vexing, but engrossing analysis of Lowell's "Skunk Hour," which Lowell told me he found interesting (as I do) as a parallel to the poem. All the same, I would not wish away any of Berryman's obiter dicta; every sidelight—impious, erudite, arrogant—is revealing. Equally delightful are his deft and incisive characterizations, and such attributions as that Cummings and Williams, "loaded with merited honours," were "impenitent, irregular, mannered," and that Pound's verse is "discrete and suave."

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