Title: Anxiety Writing and Existential Redemption in John Berryman’s Confessional Poetry

Abstract: Anxiety writing serves as a central framework for understanding John Berryman’s confessional poetry, where it manifests in three interrelated forms—realistic, neurotic, and moral. Realistic anxiety arises from traumatic memory and threats posed by the external world. Neurotic anxiety exposes deep-seated distortions of inner desire and the death drive. Moral anxiety foregrounds the subject’s spiritual struggle within guilt and ethical self-reproach. As these forms of anxiety overlap and coexist, Berryman develops a complex poetic practice that moves beyond a simple opposition between “anxiety” and “redemption.” Through polyphonic subjectivity, black humor, fragmented structures, and highly individualized rhetoric, his poetry articulates a broader and more nuanced affective spectrum. Anchored in anxiety yet persistently exceeding it, this poetics gestures toward philosophical reflections on existential redemption and responds to the crisis of subjectivity and the ruptures of modernity in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Keywords: John Berryman, confessional poetry, anxiety, existential redemption

Author: Xiaoyan Liu, Ph.D. Candidate, Foreign Studies College, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, Hunan, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2025.04.008