I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing.

Although portions of Berryman’s late work are sloppy and erratic these poems help clarify the spiritual struggle that motivates and sustains his best writing. '"Edward Hirsch observed that "the 57 stanzas of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet combine the concentration of an extended lyric with the erudition and amplitude of a historical novel. Philip Levine stated in a recorded interview from 2009 that Berryman took his class extremely seriously and that "he was entrancing.

He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and was considered a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry. John Allyn Berryman (October 25 1914 – January 7 1972) was an American poet and scholar born in McAlester Oklahoma.