ABSTRACT
In terms of his poetic engagements with physical landscape and ideas of place, one might expect Berryman's work to be rooted in distinctly American locations and locales, and there are instances in his œuvre where he writes in direct response to his experience of Boston, New York, and Minneapolis, in particular, which were the urban centers that were most familiar to him. From the very beginning of his career, the question of influence and the related pursuit of poetic identity were bound up with issues of transnational and international awareness and exchange for Berryman. Writing himself, he needed to write outside himself, away from the world of his forebears and "home-country", but his work retains the sense of division and disaffection that informed his early thinking about what it meant to be an American writer in the twentieth century.
