John Berryman

This article is about the American poet. For other people with the same name, see John Berryman (disambiguation).
John Berryman
Born John Allyn Smith, Jr.
(1914-10-25)October 25, 1914
McAlester, Oklahoma, USA
Died January 7, 1972(1972-01-07) (aged 57)
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Occupation Poet
Nationality American
Alma mater Columbia University
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 (1942-1956); divorced
Ann Levine (1956-1959); divorced
Kate Donahue (1961-1972)

John Allyn McAlpin Berryman (born John Allyn Smith, Jr.; October 25, 1914 – January 7, 1972) 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.

Life and career

John Berryman was born John Allyn Smith, Jr. in 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 Tampa, Florida. In 1926, in Florida, when the poet was eleven years old, his father shot and killed himself,[1] Berryman was haunted by his father's death for the rest of his life and would later write about his struggle to come to terms with it in his book 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.[1]

  1. ^ Berryman, John. "Dream Song #145". The Dream Songs. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. 1969.

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.[2] The poet was renamed John Allyn McAlpin Berryman. Berryman's mother also changed her first name from Peggy to Jill.[3] Although his stepfather would later divorce his mother, Berryman and his stepfather stayed on good terms.[4] With both his mother and stepfather working, his mother decided to send him away to the South Kent School, a private boarding school in Connecticut.[3] Then Berryman went on to college at Columbia College where he was president of the Philolexian Society, joined the Boar's Head Society,[5] edited the Columbia Review, and studied under the literary scholar and poet Mark Van Doren.[3] Berryman would later credit Van Doren with sparking his interest in writing poetry seriously. For two years, Berryman also studied overseas at Clare College, Cambridge, on a Kellett Fellowship, awarded by Columbia.[4] He graduated in 1936.

Regarding Berryman's earliest success in 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".[4] One of the other young poets included in the book was Randall Jarrell.

Berryman would soon publish some of this early verse in his first book, also with New Directions Publishing, simply titled Poems, in 1942. However, 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 Randall Jarrell who wrote, in The Nation, that Berryman was "a complicated, nervous, and intelligent [poet]" whose poetry in The Dispossessed was too derivative of W. B. Yeats.[3] Berryman would later concur with this assessment of his early work, stating, "I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats."[6]

In October 1942, Berryman married Eileen Mulligan (later Simpson) in a ceremony at St. Patrick's Catherdral, with poet Mark Van Doren as his best man. The pair moved to Beacon Hill, where Berryman lectured at Harvard. The marriage ended in 1953 (a divorce was formalized in 1956), when Simpson finally grew weary of tolerating Berryman's affairs and acting as "net-holder" throughout his self-destructive personal crises. Simpson would memorialize her time with Berryman and his circle in her 1982 book Poets in Their Youth.[7]

In 1947, Berryman started an affair with a married woman named Chris, documented in a long sonnet sequence that he refrained from publishing, in part, because publication of the sonnets would have revealed the affair to his wife. However, he did eventually decide to publish the work, titled Berryman's Sonnets, in 1967. The work included over one hundred sonnets.[3]

In 1950, Berryman published a biography of the fiction writer and poet Stephen Crane whom he greatly admired becoming, "the only biography by a leading American poet of the great American writer, Stephen Crane."[8] This book was followed by his next significant poem, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956), which featured illustrations by the artist Ben Shahn and was Berryman's first poem to receive "national attention" and a positive response from critics.[9] Edmund Wilson wrote that it was "the most distinguished long poem by an American since T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land." When "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and Other Poems" was published in 1959, the poet Conrad Aiken praised the shorter poems in the book which he thought were actually better than "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet".[10]

Despite the relative success of his third book of verse, Berryman's great poetic breakthrough occurred after he published 77 Dream Songs in 1964. It 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. Soon afterwards, Berryman started receiving a great deal of national attention from the press, from arts organizations, and even from the White House which sent him an invitation to dine with President Lyndon B. Johnson (though Berryman had to decline because he was in Ireland at the time).[3] Berryman was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967,[11] and that same year Life magazine ran a feature story on him. Also, that year the newly created National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a ten thousand dollar grant (though he admitted, when asked about the award by a Minneapolis reporter, that he had never heard of the organization before).[3]

Berryman also continued to work on the "dream song" poems at a feverish pace and published a second, significantly longer, volume entitled His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, in 1968, which won the National Book Award for Poetry and the Bollingen Prize.[12] The following year Berryman republished 77 Dreams Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest as one book titled The Dream Songs, in which the character Henry serves as Berryman's alter ego. But in Love & 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, at best, to hostile; now the collection is generally "considered a minor work".[13] The character of Henry reappeared in a couple of poems published in Delusions Etc., (1972), Berryman's last collection, 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.[13]

Berryman taught or lectured at a number of universities including University of Iowa (in their Writer's Workshop), Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Cincinnati, and the University of Minnesota, where he spent the majority of his career, except for his sabbatical year in 1962-3, when he taught at Brown University. 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 ... [and] he was [also] the best teacher that I ever had".[14] Berryman was fired from the University of Iowa after a fight with his landlord led to him being arrested, jailed overnight, and fined for disorderly conduct and public intoxication.[3] He turned to his friend, the poet Allen Tate, who helped him get his teaching job at the University of Minnesota.[15]

Berryman was married three times. And according to the editors of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, he lived turbulently.[4] During one of the many times he was hospitalized in order to detox from alcohol abuse, in 1970, he experienced what he termed "a sort of religious conversion". According to his biographer Paul 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."[3] Nevertheless, Berryman continued to abuse alcohol and to struggle with depression, as he had throughout much of his adult life, 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.[15]

Poetry

Berryman's poetry, which often revolved around the sordid details of his personal problems (in The Dream Songs but also in his other poems 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 Lowell. 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."[4]

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 the poem). 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.'"[16] 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".[17]

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 stanzas. The poems are written in free verse although some stanzas contain irregular rhyme. 77 Dream Songs (and its sequel 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."[18]

In The New York Times review of 77 Dream Songs, John Malcolm Brinnin praised the book, declaring that "[the book's] excellence calls for celebration".[19] 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."[20] 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 four 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 & Fame and Delusions, Etc. featured free-verse poems that were much more straightforward and less idiosyncratic than The Dream Songs. Prior to the publication of Love & Fame, Berryman sent his manuscript to several peers for feedback, including the poets Adrienne Rich and Richard Wilbur, both of whom were disappointed with the poems which they considered inferior to the poems in The Dream Songs.[3] However, a number of Berryman's old friends and supporters, including the novelist Saul Bellow and the poets Robert Lowell and William Meredith, offered high praise for a number of the Love & Fame poems. Both Love & Fame and Delusions, Etc. were more openly "confessional" than Berryman's earlier verse, and since he embraced religion when he wrote these volumes, he also explored the nature of his spiritual rebirth in poems like "Eleven Addresses to the Lord" (which Lowell thought was one of Berryman's best poems and "one of the great poems of the age"),[3] as well as "Certainty Before Lunch".

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 had 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".[21]

Berryman's Collected Poems--1937-1971 edited and introduced by Charles Thornbury, was published in 1989. However, Robert Giroux 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."[17] Hirsch also notes that, "[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."[17]

In 2004, the Library of America published John Berryman: Selected Poems, edited by the poet Kevin Young. In Poetry magazine, David Orr 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.[22]

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."[4]

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ "Tampa man killed self, coroner's jury state". The Independent (Florida). June 28, 1926. Retrieved June 16, 2015 – via Google Books.
  2. ↑ Nicorvo, Jay Baron. "The Art of Reading John Berryman." Poets & Writers. 30 January 2015.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Mariani, Paul. Dream Songs: The Life of John Berryman. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Ellman, Richard and Robert O'Clair. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1973.
  5. ↑ "26th Annual Poetry Reading Held by Boar's Head Society". Columbia Daily Spectator. 1 May 1936. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
  6. ↑ Bloom, James (1984) The stock of available reality: R.P. Blackmur and John Berryman Bucknell University Press p61 ISBN 0-8387-5066-4
  7. ↑ Yardley, Jonathan (October 16, 2006). "In the Beginning, Such a Happy Couplet". Washington Post. Retrieved 29 April 2016.
  8. ↑ Macmillan. "Stephen Crane | John Berryman | Macmillan". Macmillan. Retrieved 2016-04-27.
  9. ↑ Poetry Foundation profile
  10. ↑ Berryman, John. Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and other poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1959.
  11. ↑ "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 2011-04-15.
  12. ↑ "National Book Awards – 1969". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
    (With acceptance speech by Berryman and essay by Kiki Petrosino from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
  13. 1 2 Galassi, Jonathan. "John Berryman: Sorrows and Passions of His Majesty the Ego." Poetry Nation, No. 2, 1974. 117-124.
  14. ↑ Philip Levine in conversation with Naomi Jaffa at Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in November 2009 on YouTube
  15. 1 2 Healy, Steve (September 9, 1998). "John Berryman: The Dreamer Awakes." City Pages.
  16. ↑ Athey, Joel. American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 by the American Council of Learned Societies.
  17. 1 2 3 Hirsch, Edward. "Taking glee in the past". The New York Times October 8, 1989.
  18. ↑ "An Interview with John Berryman" conducted by John Plotz of the Harvard Advocate on Oct. 27, 1968. In Berryman's Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman. Ed. Harry Thomas. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988.
  19. ↑ Brinner, John Malcolm. "The Last Minstrel." New York Times. 23 August 1964.
  20. ↑ Robert Lowell, "John Berryman" in Robert Giroux, Ed., Collected Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987) 107-108.
  21. ↑ Gray, Paul. "A Quartet of Poets Singing Solo." Time. 21 March 1977.
  22. ↑ Orr, David. "Eight Takes: Winters, Whittier, Hollander, Lowell, Fearing, Rukeyser, Shapiro, Berryman". Poetry. December 2005.
  23. ↑ Bradley, Marion Zimmer (1984-08-26), "Spook Spoof", New York Times, retrieved 2010-10-21
Citations

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