“A Damned Word Nobody Can Hear”: Transgression, Guilt, and the Therapeutic Impasse of Self-Writing in Berryman’s Sonnets

This article argues that John Berryman (1914–72) undertakes an arduous, almost devotional project of poetic self-reckoning in Berryman’s Sonnets, one informed by therapeutic aspiration and carried out through the inherited rigours of the sonnet form. Reading the sequence against biographical evidence and the broader contours of literary history, I show how Berryman’s affair, as refracted through the Sonnets, is best understood as a troubled reenactment of unresolved familial attachments and psychosexual tensions. Berryman translates these tensions into an act of self-preservation, self-definition, and self-writing that engenders sustained inner debate across ambivalent psychic landscapes, tentatively balancing an imaginary poetic self in search of reparative energy to remedy the actual self. This psychic probing, however, gradually slips towards self-negation and existential angst that insidiously redirect the sequence’s therapeutic ambitions to a theological framework of repentance and spiritual redemption. Berryman’s reworking of Renaissance courtly-love conventions further exposes the moral degradation and theological punishment he associates with erotic passion, even as he attempts to discipline it into form. Taken together, the Sonnets incline not towards resolution or repair but towards fracture and frustration, inhabiting a liminal enclave in which desire, guilt, and the paradox of self-preservation and self-obliteration remain hauntingly bound within Berryman’s self-writing.