ABSTRACT
The year 1947 was one of painful self-encounter for Berryman. During February and March he fell in love with Lise, a twenty-seven-year-old friend who kept house with her husband and young child not far from the Berrymans themselves in Princeton, New Jersey. The affair was soon consummated, and there followed a summer of fleeting ecstasy and relentless remorse. Since he found his adultery all-consuming and destructive, the type of self-assessment that Berryman began in the months of 1947 did not resolve his self-doubts and punitive habits of mind. He felt appalled that his psychic exploration led him into a labyrinth from which no exit seemed charted. By way of compensation he absorbed himself in the problem of consciousness and creativity, the first fruits of his search taking the form of a sequence of sonnets and of an exhaustive journal which ran to hundreds of pages by the end of 1947 alone.
