‘Master of beauty, crafts­man of the snowflake, / inimitable contriver,” John Berry­man wrote. “I have made up a morning prayer to you.” It was May 1970, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet was at St. Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis, for a second round of treatment for alcoholism. “You have come to my rescue again & again / in my impassable, sometimes despairing years,” Berryman reflected, “and I believe as fixedly in the Resurrection-appearances to Peter & to Paul / as I believe I sit in this blue chair.”

Berryman is a fascinating — and confounding — study in poetic faith and doubt. His lifelong Catholicism has not quite been a secret, but his con­fessional, often hyperbolic poems, as well as his struggles and ultimate suicide, have muddied our perception of his faith. Berryman, like other cradle-Catholic writers such as James Joyce, was both sentimental and sardonic about his religion. In one of his final interviews, he affirmed his identity as a Catholic but declined to identify as a Christian in an institutional sense.

Such a sentiment is less absurd than it seems. Once a Catholic — to turn the baptismal theology into a slogan — always a Catholic. While the full sense of Berryman’s religious belief might rightly remain a mystery, the publication of his selected letters suggests that a new look at the poet’s faith is not merely warranted but essential to understanding his art.

Born in 1914 in McAlester, Okla., Berryman served as an altar boy at Holy Family Church in Anadarko. Years later, he wrote of the Benedictine priest he assisted: “I served at Mass six dawns a week from five, / adoring Father Boniface & you, / memorizing the Latin he explained.” He attended St. Joseph Academy, a Catholic boarding school in Chickasha, Okla., where he received Communion in the chapel each morning at 6:30 and then returned for Mass at 8:15.

As a boy, he had already felt the sharp pain of loss: His father committed suicide when Berryman was twelve. The memory would never leave him. In “Eleven Addresses to the Lord,” the long poem he wrote at St. Mary’s, he traced his spiritual wrangling back to that moment, when his father “blew out my most bright candle faith.”

Berryman’s letters reveal not only his continual shifting between belief and doubt but also that Catholicism remained his point of reference in life. He was drawn to Catholic intellectuals — including the mid-century poets Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, Claude McKay, Kenneth Rexroth (and Rexroth’s friend William Everson, who took the name “Brother Antoninus” as a lay brother in the Dominican Order), and Isabella Gardner, among others.

Berryman also admired the work of William F. Lynch, a Jesuit priest who had been the editor of Thought at Fordham University. Lynch was the author of a seminal book of literary criticism, Christ and Apollo, in which he argued for a Catholicism grounded in the life of Christ rather than in abstractions about God: “Even when the human soul is in the highest of contemplative states — that is to say, when it is locked most securely in the embrace of the timeless divinity — it cannot forego its grip on the humanity and temporality of Christ.”

Berryman had read parts of Lynch’s book in manuscript around the time that he wrote to the priest that he was having a “religious enquiry.” The next day, he wrote Father Lynch again, about the Christian symbolism of a strange dream he’d had about a bar and its bartender: “The ‘bar’ is the cross-beam, patibulum, in a ‘Station’ of the Cross; Christ carrying it Himself, bar-tender; but He is also on the Cross, his body ‘tender’ from the bar, and gives us from it His blood to drink.”

These are private musings, not public performances. Berryman clearly had a Catholic center, and yet, like so many Catholic artists, he pushed it away at times. Several years later, in a rather morbid letter to Ann Levine, his second wife, Berryman included a will “in case of fatal accident or death,” stipulating: “I die outside the Church, and care very little about the sort of service for burial, except that I do not want any eulogies. If anything is to be read, perhaps the last four sections of Whitman’s Song of Myself would do.”

This was the same Berryman who, ten years earlier, had drafted a letter to the editors of The Nation complaining that the back cover of an issue he appeared in had an ad from the Agora Publishing Company, whose listed titles included How the Catholic Church Helped Hitler to Power and Japanese–Vatican Entente. Berryman bemoaned the ad’s anti-Catholicism, likening it to anti-Semitism and racism. “I am ashamed to have published a book review a few pages away from such an ad, and I repeat that I am profoundly surprised,” he wrote. He never sent that letter — perhaps more a professional decision than a moral one. His heart was not merely with the faith, it was with the Church. When Pope John XXIII died in 1963, Berryman wrote to several people of his grief — “I cried & prayed” — calling him “that marvellous Pope.”

Berryman carried these paradoxes for years, until finding the right hymn for them in “Eleven Addresses to the Lord.” In June 1970, he sent his editor, Robert Giroux, a new table of contents for his forthcoming book Love and Fame, to include the “11-lyric new religious sequence that ends the book (written in hospital after a sort of conversion-experience I’ll describe to you sometime).” He soon told Life magazine reporter Jane Howard that “my relation with Him is quite strong at present.” That relation is reflected in his passionate, probing lines: “Holy, as I suppose I dare to call you / without pretending to know anything about you.” Berryman, the sinner beset by doubt, wails: “Who am I worthless that You spent such pains / and take may pains again?”

If the roll and rise of these lines sounds familiar, that is for good reason: They evoke the prosody of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Catholic poet exemplar for Berryman. What made Hopkins both difficult and brilliant, Berryman thought, was “the union, in his finest poems, of vigour & fatigue, confidence & despair, the elegant & the blunt, the bright & the dry.” If he felt the occasional swells of joy, Berryman identified only too well with Hopkins’s despair. In a letter in 1960, he wrote, “I have not been depressed, but hopeless; in pain at both ends, but chiefly the state wd be best described in Hopkins’s words during his terrible last years in Ireland, ‘weakness’ and ‘melancholy.’”

Berryman returned to St. Mary’s in October of 1970 for more treatment. “I am making myself into a new man here,” he wrote to the poet Adrienne Rich, “and sister, it hurts.” Her husband, Alfred Conrad, had just died by suicide, and Berryman pleaded with her: “It is easier for me to imagine the torment that wd drive such a lovely man to it than yr sorrow surviving. . . . I hope you are not feeling responsible.” He must, of course, have been thinking too of his own mother and father.

During that time, Berryman was working on a nine-part poem titled “Opus Dei,” structured around the Divine Office. “I find I write at present,” he noted in one letter, “for a peculiar reason, wh. I hardly know how to put — I seem to write to make Him happy.”

His epigraphs for the poem include Matthew 17:15 — “Lord, have mercy on my son: for he is lunatick, and sore vexed: for ofttimes he falleth into the fire, and oft into the water” — and 2 Chronicles 12:14: “And he did evil, because he prepared not his heart to seek the Lord.” The poem is raw, arriving like a final rush of lamentations: “I’m not a good man, I won’t ever be, / there’s no health in here.” He is “olding & ignorant, and the work is great, / daylight is long, will ever I be done, / for the work is not for the man, but the Lord God.” Berryman knows he “cannot come among Your saints, / it’s not in me,” and yet “I would rather not be lost from You — / if I could hear of a middle ground, I’d opt: // a decent if minute salvation, sort of, on some fringe.”

Berryman ended his life several months later by jumping off the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis. He had written back in 1939, in one of his first published poems, “The night is on these hills, and some can sleep. / Some stare into the dark, some walk.” Berryman did both. His final output recalls something that Father Lynch wrote in Christ and Apollo, about how there are two forms of death. In one, all that was once flesh becomes nothing more than dust. The other, de­scribed in Paul’s fascinating statement in Philippians 1:23, is one that likely spoke to Berryman’s harried soul: “I wish to be dissolved and to be with Christ.”