John Berryman
Encyclopedia
John Allyn Berryman was an American poet and scholar, born in McAlester
, Oklahoma
. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and was considered a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry. His best-known work is The Dream Songs
.
he only, very early in the morning,
rose with his gun and went outdoors by my window
and did what was needed.
I cannot read that wretched mind, so strong
& so undone. I've always tried. I–I'm
trying to forgive
whose frantic passage, when he could not live
an instant longer,in the summer dawn
left Henry to live on.
After his father's death, the poet's mother remarried another banker who was also named John, and they moved to New York City. Her new husband's last name was Berryman, and the poet took this last name, giving him the same exact name as his stepfather. Although his stepfather would later divorce his mother, Berryman and his stepfather stayed on good terms. His stepfather sent him to a private school in Connecticut (South Kent School
). Then Berryman went on to graduate from Columbia College in 1936. He also studied overseas at Clare College, Cambridge, on a Kellett Fellowship, awarded by Columbia.
Regarding Berryman's earliest success in the field of poetry, the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry editors note that "Berryman's early work formed part of a volume entitled Five Young American Poets, published by New Directions in 1940." Berryman would soon publish some of this early verse in his first book, simply titled Poems, in 1942. However, his first mature book, The Dispossessed, appeared six years later. Regarding his most important influence at the start of his career in poetry, Berryman said, "I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats."
In 1950, Berryman published a biography of the fiction writer Stephen Crane
whom he greatly admired. This book was followed by his next significant book of poems, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956) which featured illustrations by Ben Shahn
and was Berryman's first book to receive "national attention." Berryman's great poetic breakthrough occurred after he published 77 Dream Songs
in 1964. The book won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize
for poetry, and solidified Berryman's standing as one of the most important poets of the post-World War II generation that included Robert Lowell
, Elizabeth Bishop
, and Delmore Schwartz
. Berryman was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
in 1967.
Berryman continued to work on the "dream song" poems and published a second, significantly longer, volume entitled His Toy, His Dream, His Rest
, in 1969. This book won the National Book Award
and the Bollingen Prize
, and Berryman republished 77 Dreams Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, as one book, titled The Dream Songs
later that same year. In 1970 he published his follow-up to The Dream Songs, Love & Fame in which he dropped the mask of Henry and wrote candidly about himself. The volume received mixed reviews and was generally considered a minor work. The character of Henry was also missing from Delusions Etc., (1972), Berryman's last book, which focused on his religious concerns and his own spiritual rebirth. The book was published posthumously and, like its predecessor, Love & Fame, it is considered a minor work.
Berryman taught at the University of Iowa
, in their Writer's Workshop, Harvard University
, and the University of Minnesota
, where he spent the majority of his career. Some of his illustrious students included W. D. Snodgrass, William Dickey
, Donald Justice
, Philip Levine
, Robert Dana
, Jane Cooper
, Donald Finkel
, and Henri Coulette
. Philip Levine stated, in a recorded interview from 2009, that Berryman took his class extremely seriously and that, "He was entrancing. . .magnetic and inspiring and very hard on [his students'] work. . .He was [also] the best teacher that I ever had." Berryman was fired from the University of Iowa after a fight with his landlord ended up leading to his arrest. He turned to his friend, the poet Allen Tate
, who helped him get his teaching job at the University of Minnesota.
Berryman was married three times. And according to the editors of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, he lived turbulently. Throughout his life, he suffered from alcoholism and depression, and on the morning of January 7, 1972, he killed himself by jumping from the Washington Avenue Bridge
in Minneapolis, Minnesota
onto the west bank of the Mississippi River
.
. The editors of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry note that, "the influence of Yeats, Auden, Hopkins
, Crane
, and Pound
on him was strong, and Berryman's own voice--by turns nerve-racked and sportive--took some time to be heard."
Berryman's first major work, in which he began to develop his own unique style of writing, was Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, published in 1956. In the long, title poem, which first appeared in Partisan Review
in 1953, Berryman addressed the 17th century American poet Anne Bradstreet
, combining the history of her life with his own fantasies about her (and inserting himself into her life story). Joel Athey noted, "This difficult poem, a tribute to the Puritan
poet of colonial America
, took Berryman five years to complete and demanded much from the reader when it first appeared with no notes. The Times Literary Supplement
hailed it as a path-breaking masterpiece; poet Robert Fitzgerald
called it 'the poem of his generation.'" Edward Hirsch
observed that, "the 57 stanzas of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet combine the concentration of an extended lyric with the erudition and amplitude of a historical novel."
Berryman's major poetic breakthrough came after he began to publish the first volume of The Dream Songs
, 77 Dream Songs, in 1964. The dream song form consisted of short, eighteen-line lyric poems in three stanza
s. Each stanza also contained its own irregular rhyme scheme and irregular meter. 77 Dream Songs (and its sequal His Toy, His Dream, His Rest) centers on a character named "Henry" who bears a striking resemblance to John Berryman. However, Berryman was careful about making sure that his readers realized that "Henry" was not his equivalent, but rather a fictional version of himself (or a literary alter ego
). In an interview, Berryman stated, "Henry does resemble me, and I resemble Henry; but on the other hand I am not Henry. You know, I pay income tax; Henry pays no income tax. And bats come over and they stall in my hair — and fuck them, I'm not Henry; Henry doesn't have any bats."
In The New York Times
review of 77 Dream Songs, John Malcolm Brinnin
praised the book without reservation, declaring that "[the book's] excellence calls for celebration." And in The New York Review of Books
, Robert Lowell
also reviewed the book, writing, "At first the brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder and oddness. After a while, the repeated situations and their racy jabber become more and more enjoyable, although even now I wouldn't trust myself to paraphrase accurately at least half the sections." In response to the perceived difficulty of the dream songs, in his 366th "Dream Song", Berryman facetiously wrote, "These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. / They are only meant to terrify & comfort." In His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, many of the dream songs are elegies for Berryman's recently deceased poet-friends, including Delmore Schwartz
, Randall Jarrell
, and Theodore Roethke
. Since this volume contained more than three times the number of poems that appeared in the previous volume, Berryman covered a lot more subject matter. For instance, in addition to the elegies, Berryman writes about his trip to Ireland as well as his own burgeoning literary fame. Berryman's last two volumes of poetry, Love and Fame and Delusion, Etc. featured free-verse poems that were much more straightforward and less idiosyncratic than The Dream Songs. Both volumes were also more openly "confessional" than his earlier verse. And since Berryman embraced religion when he wrote these volumes, Berryman also explored the nature of his spiritual rebirth.
In 1977 John Haffenden published, Henry's Fate & Other Poems, a selection of dream songs that Berryman wrote after His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, but never published. In reviewing the book, Time magazine
noted, "Posthumous selections of unpublished poetry should be viewed suspiciously. The dead poet may have had good aesthetic reasons for keeping some of his work to himself. Fortunately, Henry's Fate does not malign the memory of John Berryman." Berryman's Collected Poems was published in 1989. However, the editor of the book, Charles Thornbury, notably decided to leave out The Dream Songs from the collection. In his review of the Collected Poems, Edward Hirsch
commented on this decision, stating, "It is obviously practical to continue to publish the 385 dream songs separately, but reading the Collected Poems without them is a little like eating a seven-course meal without a main course." Hirsch also notes that, "[The Collected Poems features] a thorough nine-part introduction and a chronology as well as helpful appendixes that include Berryman's published prefaces, notes and dedications; a section of editor's notes, guidelines and procedures; and an account of the poems in their final stages of composition and publication."
In 2004, the Library of America
published John Berryman: Selected Poems, edited by the poet Kevin Young
. In Poetry magazine
, David Orr
wrote:
After surveying Berryman's career and accomplishments, the editors of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry stated, "What seems likely to survive of his poetry is its pungent and many-leveled portrait of a complex personality which, for all its eccentricity, stayed close to the center of the intellectual and emotional life of the mid-century and after."
, published in 1984. The Hold Steady
's song "Stuck Between Stations" from the 2006 album Boys and Girls in America
relates a loose rendition of Berryman's death, describing the isolation he felt, despite his critical acclaim, and depicting him walking with "the devil" on the Washington Avenue Bridge
where he committed suicide. Okkervil River's song "John Allyn Smith Sails" from their 2007 album The Stage Names
is about John Berryman.
McAlester, Oklahoma
McAlester is a city in Pittsburg County, Oklahoma, United States. The population was 17,783 at the 2000 census. It is the county seat of Pittsburg County. It is currently the largest city in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, followed by Durant....
, Oklahoma
Oklahoma
Oklahoma is a state located in the South Central region of the United States of America. With an estimated 3,751,351 residents as of the 2010 census and a land area of 68,667 square miles , Oklahoma is the 28th most populous and 20th-largest state...
. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and was considered a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry. His best-known work is The Dream Songs
The Dream Songs
The Dream Songs is a compilation of two books of poetry, 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest by the American poet, John Berryman...
.
Life and career
John Berryman was born and raised in Oklahoma until the age of 10, when his father, John Smith, a banker, and his mother, who was a schoolteacher, moved to Tampa, Florida. In 1926, in Florida, when the poet was twelve, his father shot and killed himself just outside his son's bedroom window. Berryman would later write about his father's suicide in poems from The Dream Songs. In "Dream Song #143," he wrote, "That mad drive [to commit suicide] wiped out my childhood. I put him down/while all the same on forty years I love him/stashed in Oklahoma/besides his brother Will." In "Dream Song #145," he also wrote the following lines about his father:he only, very early in the morning,
rose with his gun and went outdoors by my window
and did what was needed.
I cannot read that wretched mind, so strong
& so undone. I've always tried. I–I'm
trying to forgive
whose frantic passage, when he could not live
an instant longer,in the summer dawn
left Henry to live on.
After his father's death, the poet's mother remarried another banker who was also named John, and they moved to New York City. Her new husband's last name was Berryman, and the poet took this last name, giving him the same exact name as his stepfather. Although his stepfather would later divorce his mother, Berryman and his stepfather stayed on good terms. His stepfather sent him to a private school in Connecticut (South Kent School
South Kent School
South Kent School is a private boarding school for boys in South Kent, Connecticut, United States. The school is located on a campus in the hills of Litchfield County. It was founded in 1923 as a joint venture between Reverend Frederick Herbert Sill, headmaster of Kent School, and two of his...
). Then Berryman went on to graduate from Columbia College in 1936. He also studied overseas at Clare College, Cambridge, on a Kellett Fellowship, awarded by Columbia.
Regarding Berryman's earliest success in the field of poetry, the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry editors note that "Berryman's early work formed part of a volume entitled Five Young American Poets, published by New Directions in 1940." Berryman would soon publish some of this early verse in his first book, simply titled Poems, in 1942. However, his first mature book, The Dispossessed, appeared six years later. Regarding his most important influence at the start of his career in poetry, Berryman said, "I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats."
In 1950, Berryman published a biography of the fiction writer Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane was an American novelist, short story writer, poet and journalist. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism...
whom he greatly admired. This book was followed by his next significant book of poems, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956) which featured illustrations by Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn was a Lithuanian-born American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content.-Biography:...
and was Berryman's first book to receive "national attention." Berryman's great poetic breakthrough occurred after he published 77 Dream Songs
The Dream Songs
The Dream Songs is a compilation of two books of poetry, 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest by the American poet, John Berryman...
in 1964. The book won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
for poetry, and solidified Berryman's standing as one of the most important poets of the post-World War II generation that included Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...
, Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956 and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. Elizabeth Bishop House is an artists' retreat in Great Village, Nova Scotia...
, and Delmore Schwartz
Delmore Schwartz
Delmore Schwartz was an American poet and short story writer from Brooklyn, New York.-Biography:Schwartz was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His parents, Harry and Rose, both Romanian Jews, separated when Schwartz was nine, and their divorce had a profound effect on him. Later, in 1930,...
. Berryman was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
in 1967.
Berryman continued to work on the "dream song" poems and published a second, significantly longer, volume entitled His Toy, His Dream, His Rest
The Dream Songs
The Dream Songs is a compilation of two books of poetry, 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest by the American poet, John Berryman...
, in 1969. This book won the National Book Award
National Book Award
The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...
and the Bollingen Prize
Bollingen Prize
The Bollingen Prize for Poetry, which is currently awarded every two years by Beinecke Library of Yale University, is a literary honor bestowed on an American poet in recognition of the best book of new verse within the last two years, or for lifetime achievement.-Inception and controversy:The...
, and Berryman republished 77 Dreams Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, as one book, titled The Dream Songs
The Dream Songs
The Dream Songs is a compilation of two books of poetry, 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest by the American poet, John Berryman...
later that same year. In 1970 he published his follow-up to The Dream Songs, Love & Fame in which he dropped the mask of Henry and wrote candidly about himself. The volume received mixed reviews and was generally considered a minor work. The character of Henry was also missing from Delusions Etc., (1972), Berryman's last book, which focused on his religious concerns and his own spiritual rebirth. The book was published posthumously and, like its predecessor, Love & Fame, it is considered a minor work.
Berryman taught at the University of Iowa
University of Iowa
The University of Iowa is a public state-supported research university located in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. It is the oldest public university in the state. The university is organized into eleven colleges granting undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees...
, in their Writer's Workshop, Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, and the University of Minnesota
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...
, where he spent the majority of his career. Some of his illustrious students included W. D. Snodgrass, William Dickey
William Dickey (poet)
William Hobart Dickey was an American poet and professor of English and creative writing at San Francisco State University. He authored 15 books of poetry over a career that lasted three and a half decades....
, Donald Justice
Donald Justice
Donald Justice was an American poet and teacher of writing. In summing up Justice's career, David Orr has written, "In most ways, Justice was no different from any number of solid, quiet older writers devoted to traditional short poems. But he was different in one important sense: sometimes his...
, Philip Levine
Philip Levine (poet)
Philip Levine is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet best known for his poems about working-class Detroit. He taught for over thirty years at the English Department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well...
, Robert Dana
Robert Dana
-External links:Links to poems*, poetry by Robert Dana including "Heat", "A Short History of the Middle West", and "Beach Attitudes" on The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor*, poetry by Robert Dana including the poem "Rapture" on Anhinga Press....
, Jane Cooper
Jane Cooper
-Life and career:Cooper was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, spent her early childhood in Jacksonville, Florida, and then moved with her family to Princeton in the mid-1930s. She attended Vassar College from 1942 to 1944, and earned a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 1946. In 1953–54...
, Donald Finkel
Donald Finkel
Donald Alexander Finkel was an American poet best known for his unorthodox styles and "curious juxtapositions".-Life:...
, and Henri Coulette
Henri Coulette
Henri Coulette was an American poet and educator. His first book, The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems , was greeted with acclaim and won the Lamont Poetry Prize...
. Philip Levine stated, in a recorded interview from 2009, that Berryman took his class extremely seriously and that, "He was entrancing. . .magnetic and inspiring and very hard on [his students'] work. . .He was [also] the best teacher that I ever had." Berryman was fired from the University of Iowa after a fight with his landlord ended up leading to his arrest. He turned to his friend, the poet Allen Tate
Allen Tate
John Orley Allen Tate was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1943 to 1944.-Life:...
, who helped him get his teaching job at the University of Minnesota.
Berryman was married three times. And according to the editors of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, he lived turbulently. Throughout his life, he suffered from alcoholism and depression, and on the morning of January 7, 1972, he killed himself by jumping from the Washington Avenue Bridge
Washington Avenue Bridge (Minneapolis)
The Washington Avenue Bridge carries County Road 122 across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota and connects the East Bank and West Bank portions of the University of Minnesota's main campus...
in Minneapolis, Minnesota
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Minneapolis , nicknamed "City of Lakes" and the "Mill City," is the county seat of Hennepin County, the largest city in the U.S. state of Minnesota, and the 48th largest in the United States...
onto the west bank of the Mississippi River
Mississippi River
The Mississippi River is the largest river system in North America. Flowing entirely in the United States, this river rises in western Minnesota and meanders slowly southwards for to the Mississippi River Delta at the Gulf of Mexico. With its many tributaries, the Mississippi's watershed drains...
.
Poetry
Berryman's poetry, which often revolved around the sordid details of his personal problems (in The Dream Songs but also in his other books as well) is closely associated with the Confessional poetry movement. In this sense, his poetry had much in common with the poetry of his friend, Robert LowellRobert Lowell
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...
. The editors of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry note that, "the influence of Yeats, Auden, Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous 20th-century fame established him among the leading Victorian poets...
, Crane
Hart Crane
-Career:Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings , his first volume, ratified and strengthened...
, and Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
on him was strong, and Berryman's own voice--by turns nerve-racked and sportive--took some time to be heard."
Berryman's first major work, in which he began to develop his own unique style of writing, was Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, published in 1956. In the long, title poem, which first appeared in Partisan Review
Partisan Review
Partisan Review was an American political and literary quarterly published from 1934 to 2003, though it suspended publication between October 1936 and December 1937.-Overview:...
in 1953, Berryman addressed the 17th century American poet Anne Bradstreet
Anne Bradstreet
Anne Dudley Bradstreet was New England's first published poet. Her work met with a positive reception in both the Old World and the New World.-Biography:...
, combining the history of her life with his own fantasies about her (and inserting himself into her life story). Joel Athey noted, "This difficult poem, a tribute to the Puritan
Puritan
The Puritans were a significant grouping of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some Marian exiles from the clergy shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1558, as an activist movement within the Church of England...
poet of colonial America
Colonial America
The colonial history of the United States covers the history from the start of European settlement and especially the history of the thirteen colonies of Britain until they declared independence in 1776. In the late 16th century, England, France, Spain and the Netherlands launched major...
, took Berryman five years to complete and demanded much from the reader when it first appeared with no notes. The Times Literary Supplement
The Times Literary Supplement
The Times Literary Supplement is a weekly literary review published in London by News International, a subsidiary of News Corporation.-History:...
hailed it as a path-breaking masterpiece; poet Robert Fitzgerald
Robert Fitzgerald
Robert Stuart Fitzgerald was a poet, critic and translator whose renderings of the Greek classics "became standard works for a generation of scholars and students." He was best known as a translator of ancient Greek and Latin...
called it 'the poem of his generation.'" Edward Hirsch
Edward Hirsch
Edward Hirsch is an American poet and critic who wrote a national bestseller about reading poetry. He has published eight books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems , which brings together thirty-five years of work. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial...
observed that, "the 57 stanzas of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet combine the concentration of an extended lyric with the erudition and amplitude of a historical novel."
Berryman's major poetic breakthrough came after he began to publish the first volume of The Dream Songs
The Dream Songs
The Dream Songs is a compilation of two books of poetry, 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest by the American poet, John Berryman...
, 77 Dream Songs, in 1964. The dream song form consisted of short, eighteen-line lyric poems in three stanza
Stanza
In poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger poem. In modern poetry, the term is often equivalent with strophe; in popular vocal music, a stanza is typically referred to as a "verse"...
s. Each stanza also contained its own irregular rhyme scheme and irregular meter. 77 Dream Songs (and its sequal His Toy, His Dream, His Rest) centers on a character named "Henry" who bears a striking resemblance to John Berryman. However, Berryman was careful about making sure that his readers realized that "Henry" was not his equivalent, but rather a fictional version of himself (or a literary alter ego
Alter ego
An alter ego is a second self, which is believe to be distinct from a person's normal or original personality. The term was coined in the early nineteenth century when dissociative identity disorder was first described by psychologists...
). In an interview, Berryman stated, "Henry does resemble me, and I resemble Henry; but on the other hand I am not Henry. You know, I pay income tax; Henry pays no income tax. And bats come over and they stall in my hair — and fuck them, I'm not Henry; Henry doesn't have any bats."
In The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
review of 77 Dream Songs, John Malcolm Brinnin
John Malcolm Brinnin
John Malcolm Brinnin was an American poet and literary critic. Brinnin was born in Halifax Nova Scotia to two United States citizens....
praised the book without reservation, declaring that "[the book's] excellence calls for celebration." And in The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
, Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...
also reviewed the book, writing, "At first the brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder and oddness. After a while, the repeated situations and their racy jabber become more and more enjoyable, although even now I wouldn't trust myself to paraphrase accurately at least half the sections." In response to the perceived difficulty of the dream songs, in his 366th "Dream Song", Berryman facetiously wrote, "These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. / They are only meant to terrify & comfort." In His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, many of the dream songs are elegies for Berryman's recently deceased poet-friends, including Delmore Schwartz
Delmore Schwartz
Delmore Schwartz was an American poet and short story writer from Brooklyn, New York.-Biography:Schwartz was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His parents, Harry and Rose, both Romanian Jews, separated when Schwartz was nine, and their divorce had a profound effect on him. Later, in 1930,...
, Randall Jarrell
Randall Jarrell
Randall Jarrell was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a role which now holds the title of US Poet Laureate.-Life:Jarrell was a native of Nashville, Tennessee...
, and Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke was an American poet, who published several volumes of poetry characterized by its rhythm, rhyming, and natural imagery. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954 for his book, The Waking.-Biography:...
. Since this volume contained more than three times the number of poems that appeared in the previous volume, Berryman covered a lot more subject matter. For instance, in addition to the elegies, Berryman writes about his trip to Ireland as well as his own burgeoning literary fame. Berryman's last two volumes of poetry, Love and Fame and Delusion, Etc. featured free-verse poems that were much more straightforward and less idiosyncratic than The Dream Songs. Both volumes were also more openly "confessional" than his earlier verse. And since Berryman embraced religion when he wrote these volumes, Berryman also explored the nature of his spiritual rebirth.
In 1977 John Haffenden published, Henry's Fate & Other Poems, a selection of dream songs that Berryman wrote after His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, but never published. In reviewing the book, Time magazine
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
noted, "Posthumous selections of unpublished poetry should be viewed suspiciously. The dead poet may have had good aesthetic reasons for keeping some of his work to himself. Fortunately, Henry's Fate does not malign the memory of John Berryman." Berryman's Collected Poems was published in 1989. However, the editor of the book, Charles Thornbury, notably decided to leave out The Dream Songs from the collection. In his review of the Collected Poems, Edward Hirsch
Edward Hirsch
Edward Hirsch is an American poet and critic who wrote a national bestseller about reading poetry. He has published eight books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems , which brings together thirty-five years of work. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial...
commented on this decision, stating, "It is obviously practical to continue to publish the 385 dream songs separately, but reading the Collected Poems without them is a little like eating a seven-course meal without a main course." Hirsch also notes that, "[The Collected Poems features] a thorough nine-part introduction and a chronology as well as helpful appendixes that include Berryman's published prefaces, notes and dedications; a section of editor's notes, guidelines and procedures; and an account of the poems in their final stages of composition and publication."
In 2004, the Library of America
Library of America
The Library of America is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.- Overview and history :Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published over 200 volumes by a wide range of authors from Mark Twain to Philip...
published John Berryman: Selected Poems, edited by the poet Kevin Young
Kevin Young (poet)
Kevin Young is an American poet and teacher of poetry. Young graduated from Harvard College in 1992, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University , and received his MFA from Brown University. While in Boston and Providence, he was part of the African-American poetry group, The Dark Room Collective...
. In Poetry magazine
Poetry (magazine)
Poetry , published in Chicago, Illinois since 1912, is one of the leading monthly poetry journals in the English-speaking world. Published by the Poetry Foundation and currently edited by Christian Wiman, the magazine has a circulation of 30,000 and prints 300 poems per year out of approximately...
, David Orr
David Orr (journalist)
David Orr is an American journalist, attorney, and poet who is noted for his reviews and essays on poetry.Orr grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. He earned a bachelor's degree in English literature from Princeton University in 1996, and subsequently a law degree from Yale University. While still...
wrote:
Young includes all the Greatest Hits [from Berryman's career]. . .but there are also substantial excerpts from Berryman’s Sonnets (the peculiar book that appeared after The Dream Songs, but was written long before) and Berryman’s later, overtly religious poetry. Young argues that “if his middle, elegiac period...is most in need of rediscovery, then these late poems are most in need of redemption.” It’s a good point. Although portions of Berryman’s late work are sloppy and erratic, these poems help clarify the spiritual struggle that motivates and sustains his best writing.
After surveying Berryman's career and accomplishments, the editors of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry stated, "What seems likely to survive of his poetry is its pungent and many-leveled portrait of a complex personality which, for all its eccentricity, stayed close to the center of the intellectual and emotional life of the mid-century and after."
In popular culture
The ghost of John Berryman is a character in Thomas Disch's novel The Businessman: A Tale of TerrorThe Businessman: A Tale of Terror
The Businessman: A Tale of Terror is a novel written by Thomas M. Disch, and published by Harper & Row in 1984. The Businessman is a contemporary novel, a form that Disch—best known for his science fiction—had not hitherto tried, although all of his subsequent adult novels have shared its...
, published in 1984. The Hold Steady
The Hold Steady
The Hold Steady is an American indie rock band from Brooklyn, New York, formed in 2004. The band consists of Craig Finn , Tad Kubler , Galen Polivka , Bobby Drake , and Steve Selvidge...
's song "Stuck Between Stations" from the 2006 album Boys and Girls in America
Boys and Girls in America
Boys and Girls in America is the third studio album by The Hold Steady, released on October 3, 2006 by Vagrant Records.On August 18, 2006, first single "Chips Ahoy!" was released as a free download from music site Pitchfork Media...
relates a loose rendition of Berryman's death, describing the isolation he felt, despite his critical acclaim, and depicting him walking with "the devil" on the Washington Avenue Bridge
Washington Avenue Bridge (Minneapolis)
The Washington Avenue Bridge carries County Road 122 across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota and connects the East Bank and West Bank portions of the University of Minnesota's main campus...
where he committed suicide. Okkervil River's song "John Allyn Smith Sails" from their 2007 album The Stage Names
The Stage Names
The Stage Names is the fourth full-length studio album by American indie rock band Okkervil River, released on August 7, 2007. The album was recorded in Austin, Texas, with longtime Okkervil producer Brian Beattie, and with mixing from Spoon drummer and producer Jim Eno. Like other Okkervil River...
is about John Berryman.
External links
- Profile and works at the Poetry Foundation
- Profile and works written and audio at The Academy of American Poets
- Profile and works from Modern American Poetry, University of Illinois
- Review of The Dream Songs
- John Berryman's Gravesite
- Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture - Berryman, John
- Modern American Poetry Critical essays on Berryman's works