John Berryman

This article is about the American poet. For other people with the same name, seeJohn Berryman (disambiguation).

John Berryman
Born	John Allyn Smith, Jr. (1914-10-25)October 25, 1914 McAlester, Oklahoma,U.S.
Died	January 7, 1972(1972-01-07)(aged 57) Minneapolis,Minnesota, U.S.
Occupation	Poet
Education	Columbia University(BA)
Period	1942–1972
Literary movement	Confessional poetry
Notable works	The Dream Songs
Notable awards	National Book Award,Pulitzer Prize for Poetry,Bollingen Prize
Spouse	Eileen Simpson ​ ​ (m.1942;div.1956)​ Ann Levine ​ ​ (m.1956;div.1959)​ Kate Donahue ​ (m.1961)​

John Allyn McAlpin Berryman(bornJohn Allyn Smith, Jr.;October 25, 1914 – January 7, 1972) was an American poet and scholar. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in the "confessional"school of poetry. His77 Dream Songs(1964) won the 1965Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Life and career

John Berryman was born on October 25, 1914, inMcAlester,Oklahoma,where he was raised until the age of ten, when his father, John Smith, a banker, and his mother, Martha (also known as Peggy), a schoolteacher, moved to Florida. In 1926, inClearwater, Florida,when Berryman was 11 years old, his father shot and killed himself. Smith was jobless at the time, and he and Martha were filing for divorce.Berryman was haunted by his father's death for the rest of his life and wrote about his struggle to come to terms with it in much of his poetry.

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 of 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.

Similarly, in Dream Song #384, Berryman wrote:

The marker slants, flowerless, day's almost done,
I stand above my father's grave with rage,
often, often before
I've made this awful pilgrimage to one
who cannot visit me, who tore his page
out: I come back for more,

I spit upon this dreadful bankers grave
who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn

Kipling Arms Apartments, Mandalay Drive, Clearwater Beach, Florida

After his father's death at the rear entrance to Kipling Arms, where the Smiths rented an apartment, the poet's mother, within months, married John Angus McAlpin Berryman in New York City.The poet was renamed John Allyn McAlpin Berryman. Berryman's mother also changed her first name from Peggy to Jill.Although his stepfather later divorced his mother, Berryman and his stepfather stayed on good terms.With both his mother and stepfather working, his mother decided to send him to theSouth Kent School,a private boarding school in Connecticut.Berryman then attendedColumbia College,where he was president of thePhilolexian Society,joined theBoar's Head Society,editedThe Columbia Review,and studied under the literary scholar and poetMark Van Doren.Berryman later credited Van Doren with sparking his interest in writing poetry seriously. For two years, Berryman also studied overseas atClare College, Cambridge,on a Kellett Fellowship from Columbia.He graduated in 1936.

Berryman's early work formed part of a volume titledFive Young American Poets,published byNew Directionsin 1940.One of the other young poets included in the book wasRandall Jarrell.

Berryman published some of this early verse in his first book,Poems,in 1942. His first mature collection of poems,The Dispossessed,appeared six years later, published by William Sloane Associates. The book received largely negative reviews from poets like Jarrell, who wrote, inThe Nation,that Berryman was "a complicated, nervous, and intelligent [poet]" whose work was too derivative ofW. B. Yeats.Berryman later concurred with this assessment of his early work, saying, "I didn't want to belikeYeats; I wanted tobeYeats. "

In October 1942, Berryman marriedEileen Mulligan(later Simpson) in a ceremony atSt. Patrick's Cathedral,with Van Doren as his best man. The couple moved toBeacon Hill,and Berryman lectured at Harvard. The marriage ended in 1953 (the divorce was formalized in 1956), when Simpson finally grew weary of Berryman's affairs and acting as "net-holder" during his self-destructive personal crises. Simpson memorialized her time with Berryman and his circle in her 1982 bookPoets in Their Youth.

In 1947, Berryman started an affair with a married woman named Chris Haynes, documented in a long sonnet sequence that he refrained from publishing in part because that would have revealed the affair to his wife. He eventually published the work,Berryman's Sonnets,in 1967. It includes over one hundred sonnets.

In 1950, Berryman published a biography of the fiction writer and poetStephen Crane,whom he greatly admired.The book was followed by his next significant poem,Homage to Mistress Bradstreet(1956), a conversation with the 17th-century poetAnne Bradstreetwhich featured illustrations by the artistBen Shahnand was Berryman's first poem to receive "national attention" and a positive response from critics.Edmund Wilsonwrote that it was "the most distinguished long poem by an American sinceT. S. Eliot'sThe Waste Land."WhenHomage to Mistress Bradstreet and Other Poemswas published in 1959, the poetConrad Aikenpraised the book's shorter poems, which he found superior to "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet".

Despite his third book of verse's relative success, Berryman's great poetic breakthrough occurred with77 Dream Songs(1964). It won the 1965Pulitzer Prizefor poetry and solidified Berryman's standing as one of the most important poets of the post-World War II generation that includedRobert Lowell,Elizabeth Bishop,andDelmore Schwartz.Soon thereafter, the press began to give Berryman a great deal of attention, as did arts organizations and even the White House, which sent him an invitation to dine with PresidentLyndon B. Johnson(though Berryman declined because he was inIrelandat the time).Berryman was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciencesin 1967,and that same yearLifemagazine ran a feature story on him. Also that year the newly createdNational Endowment for the Artsawarded him a $10,000 grant (when a Minneapolis reporter asked him about the award, he said that he had never heard of NEA before receiving it).

Berryman also continued to work on the "dream song" poems at a feverish pace and in 1968 published a second, significantly longer, volume,His Toy, His Dream, His Rest,which won theNational Book Award for Poetryand theBollingen Prize.The next year Berryman republished77 Dreams SongsandHis Toy, His Dream, His Restas one book,The Dream Songs,in which the character Henry serves as Berryman's alter ego. InLove & Fame(1970), he dropped the mask of Henry to write more plainly about his life. Responses to the poems from critics and most of Berryman's peers ranged from tepid to hostile; the collection is now generally "considered a minor work".Henry reappeared in a couple of poems published inDelusions Etc.(1972), Berryman's last collection, which focused on his religious concerns and spiritual rebirth. The book was published posthumously and, likeLove & Fame,is considered a minor work.

Berryman taught or lectured at a number of universities, including theUniversity of Iowa(at theWriter's Workshop),Harvard University,Princeton University,theUniversity of Cincinnati,and theUniversity of Minnesota,where he spent most of his career, except for his sabbatical year in 1962–3, when he taught atBrown University.Some of his illustrious students includedW. D. Snodgrass,William Dickey,Donald Justice,Philip Levine,Robert Dana,Jane Cooper,Donald Finkel,andHenri Coulette.In a 2009 interview, Levine said Berryman took his class extremely seriously and that "he was entrancing... magnetic and inspiring and very hard on [his students'] work... [and] he was [also] the best teacher that I ever had".Berryman was fired from the University of Iowa after a fight with his landlord led to his being arrested, jailed overnight, and fined for disorderly conduct and public intoxication.His friend the poetAllen Tatehelped him get the job at theUniversity of Minnesota.

Personal life and death

Berryman was married three times. According to the editors ofThe Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry,he lived turbulently.During one of the many times he was hospitalized for alcohol abuse, in 1970, he experienced what he termed "a sort of religious conversion". According to his biographerPaul Mariani,Berryman experienced "a sudden and radical shift from a belief in a transcendent God... to a belief in a God who cared for the individual fates of human beings and who even interceded for them."Nevertheless, Berryman continued to abuse alcohol and struggle with depression, as he had throughout much of his life, and on the morning of January 7, 1972, he killed himself by jumping from theWashington Avenue BridgeinMinneapolisonto the west bank of theMississippi River.

Poetry

Berryman's poetry, which often revolves around the sordid details of his personal problems, is closely associated with the"confessional" poetrymovement. In this sense, his poetry had much in common with the poetry of his friendRobert Lowell.The editors ofThe Norton Anthology of Modern Poetrynote that "the influence ofYeats,Auden,Hopkins,Crane,andPoundon 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 style, wasHomage to Mistress Bradstreet.In the long, title poem, which first appeared inPartisan Reviewin 1953, Berryman addresses the 17th-century American poetAnne Bradstreet,combining her life history with his fantasies about her (and inserting himself into the poem). Joel Athey noted, "This difficult poem, a tribute to thePuritanpoet ofcolonial America,took Berryman five years to complete and demanded much from the reader when it first appeared with no notes.The Times Literary Supplementhailed it as a path-breaking masterpiece; poetRobert Fitzgeraldcalled it 'the poem of his generation.' "Edward Hirschobserved that "the 57stanzasofHomage to Mistress Bradstreetcombine the concentration of an extended lyric with the erudition and amplitude of a historical novel ".

Berryman's major poetic breakthrough came after the first volume ofThe Dream Songs,77 Dream Songs,in 1964. The dream song form consists of short, 18-line lyric poems in threestanzas.They are in free verse, with some stanzas containing irregular rhyme.77 Dream Songs(and its sequelHis Toy, His Dream, His Rest) centers on a character named Henry who bears a striking resemblance to Berryman, but Berryman was careful to make sure his readers realized that Henry was a fictional version of himself (or a literaryalter ego). In an interview, Berryman said, "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."

John Malcolm Brinnin,reviewing77 Dream SongsinThe New York Times,wrote that its "excellence calls for celebration".Robert Lowellwrote inThe New York Review of Books,"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".

InHis Toy, His Dream, His Rest,many of the dream songs are elegies for Berryman's recently deceased poet friends, includingDelmore Schwartz,Randall Jarrell,andTheodore Roethke.The volume contains four times as many poems as the previous one, and covers 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 & FameandDelusions, Etc.,featuredfree-versepoems that were much more straightforward and less idiosyncratic thanThe Dream Songs.BeforeLove & Fame's publication, Berryman sent his manuscript to several peers for feedback, including the poetsAdrienne RichandRichard Wilbur,both of whom were disappointed with the poems, which they considered inferior to those ofThe Dream Songs.But some of Berryman's old friends and supporters, including Lowell, the novelistSaul Bellow,and the poetWilliam Meredith,offered high praise for a number of theLove & Famepoems.Love & FameandDelusions, Etc.were more openly "confessional" than Berryman's earlier verse, and also explored the nature of his spiritual rebirth in poems like "Eleven Addresses to the Lord" (which Lowell thought one of Berryman's best poems and "one of the great poems of the age" )and "Certainty Before Lunch".

In 1977 John Haffenden publishedHenry's Fate & Other Poems,a selection of dream songs that Berryman wrote afterHis Toy, His Dream, His Restbut did not publish. According toTimemagazine's review, "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 Fatedoes not malign the memory of John Berryman ".

Berryman'sCollected Poems--1937-1971,edited and introduced by Charles Thornbury, was published in 1989. Robert Giroux decided to omitThe Dream Songsfrom the collection. In his review of theCollected Poems,Edward Hirschsaid of this decision, "It is obviously practical to continue to publish the 385 dream songs separately, but reading theCollected Poemswithout them is a little like eating a seven-course meal without a main course. "Hirsch also wrote that, "[Collected Poemsfeatures] 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, theLibrary of AmericapublishedJohn Berryman: Selected Poems,edited by the poetKevin Young.InPoetrymagazine,David Orrwrote:

Young includes all the Greatest Hits [from Berryman's career]... but there are also substantial excerpts from Berryman'sSonnets(the peculiar book that appeared afterThe 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 ofThe Norton Anthology of Modern Poetrywrote, "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

• Berryman's ghost is a character inThomas Disch's novelThe Businessman: A Tale of Terror,published in 1984.
• The Hold Steady's song "Stuck Between Stations" from the 2006 albumBoys and Girls in Americarelates a loose rendition of Berryman's death, describing the isolation he felt, despite his critical acclaim, and depicting him walking with "the devil" on theWashington Avenue Bridgewhere he committed suicide.
• Okkervil River's song "John Allyn Smith Sails" from their 2007 albumThe Stage Namesis about Berryman.
• Australian singer/songwriterNick Cavehas cited Berryman's influence on the composition of his 1992 albumHenry's Dream,and also expressed his admiration overtly in the song "We Call Upon the Author" from the 2007 albumDig, Lazarus, Dig!!!
• Phish bassistMike Gordon's side-project band has performed "Dream Song 22-'Of 1826'", releasing it on a live album,The Egg.Additionally, on March 30, 2014, their show featured a rendition of "The Poet's Final Instructions".
• Berryman's Dream Song 235 is referenced inElizabeth Strout's novelOlive Kitteridgeand its HBO adaption with the quotation, "Save us from shotguns & fathers' suicides."
• Berryman's poem "The Curse" is referenced in the prologue of Tracy Letts's playAugust: Osage Countyby the character Beverly, a poet who later commits suicide.
• On 14 January 1974 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation airedThe Hours of John Berryman,a 60-minute commentary on Berryman's "Opus Dei" (the 8-poem sequence that opensDelusions) by Canadian scholar and criticGeorge Whalley.John Reeves produced the broadcast.
• Irish poetDesmond Egancontemplates Berryman's suicide in "For John Berryman", which appears in his 2008 collectionSeptember Dandelion.
• The season finales ofSuccession's four seasons are named after phrases from "Dream Song 29": "Nobody Is Ever Missing","This Is Not for Tears","All the Bells Say",and"With Open Eyes".

Bibliography

Poetry

• Poems(Norfolk, CT: New Directions Press, 1942).
• The Dispossessed(New York: William Sloan Associates, 1948).
• Homage to Mistress Bradstreet(New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1956).
• 77 Dream Songs(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964).
• Berryman's Sonnets(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967).
• His Toy, His Dream His Rest(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968).
• The Dream Songs(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969).
• Love & Fame(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970).
• Delusions, Etc. of John Berryman(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972).
• Henry's Fate & Other Poems, 1967-1972(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977).
• Collected Poems 1937-1971,ed. Charles Thornbury (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989).
• Selected Poems,ed. Kevin Young (New York: Library of America, 2004).
• The Heart Is Strange,ed. Daniel Swift (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014).

Prose

• Stephen Crane(New York: William Sloan Associates, 1950).
• The Freedom of the Poet(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976).
• Berryman'sShakespeare,ed. John Haffenden (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999).
• The Selected Letters of John Berryman,ed. Philip Coleman and Calista McRae (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2020).
• Conversations with John Berryman,ed. Eric Hoffman (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2021).

Fiction

• Recovery(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973).

References

Citations

• Bloom, James D.The Stock of Available Reality: R.P. Blackmur and John Berryman.(Bucknell University Press, 1984)
• Dickey, James.From Babel to Byzantium: Poets and Poetry Now(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968)
• Dinger, Ed.Seems Like Old Times(Iowa)
• Haffenden, John.The Life of John Berryman(Arc Paperbacks)
• Mariani, Paul.Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman(NY, Morrow, 1990)
• Simpson, Eileen.The Maze(NY, Simon & Schuster, 1975)
• Simpson, Eileen.Poets in Their Youth(NY, 1984)

External links

• Works by John BerrymanatOpen Library
• John Berryman profile and worksat the Poetry Foundation
• John Berryman profile and selected worksatAcademy of American Poets
• Profile and worksfrom Modern American Poetry, University of Illinois
• Peter A. Stitt (Winter 1972)."John Berryman, The Art of Poetry No. 16".The Paris Review.Winter 1972 (53).
• Review of The Dream SongsArchived2009-06-16 at theWayback Machine
• Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture - Berryman, John
• Modern American PoetryCritical essays on Berryman's works
• John BerrymanatFind a Grave
• John BerrymanatLibrary of CongressAuthorities — with 50 catalog records
• John Berryman Collectionat Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library
• Finding aid to William Meredith collection of John Berryman papers and library at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.