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| 1/7/1972 |
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Berryman: Dream Songs to Suicide
On this day in 1972 the American poet John Berryman committed suicide at the age of fifty-seven. His 77 Dream Songs won the 1964 Pulitzer, and the writing of some 300 more over the subsequent years earned Berryman international fame, but his personal problems kept pace; by the end, his hopes for religion, writing, teaching, marriage and change all seemed out of reach. |
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| 9/16/1672 |
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Bradstreet, Berryman, Wheatley
On this day in 1672 Anne Bradstreet, the first published poet of the American colonies, died. Many of her poems are conventional, but others have personality and a New World edge: "I am obnoxious to each carping tongue, / Who sayes, my hand a needle better fits. . . ." Such lines inspired John Berryman to Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, the collection which brought him first fame. |
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Berryman and Lowell
by Stephen Matterson
poetry, analysis and criticism |
Berryman's Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman
by Harry Thomas (Editor)
criticism and analysis |
Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman
by Paul Mariani
biography |
John Berryman
by Harold Bloom (Editor), William Golding
biography, criticism and analysis |
John Berryman
by William J. Martz
biography |
On Suicide: Great Writers on the Ultimate Question
by John Miller (Editor), Genevieve Anderson (Editor), Genevieve Morgan (Editor)
nonfiction |
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FIND BOOKS BY JOHN BERRYMAN
AT
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Academy of American Poets
Berryman biography, poetry, bibliography, and links. Selected poems include "The Ball Poem" and excerpts from Dream Songs.
"... 77 Dream Songs, which was published in 1964 and awarded a Pulitzer Prize, unveiled the unforgettable and irreppressible alter egos 'Henry' and 'Mr. Bones' in a sequence of sonnet-like poems whose wrenched syntax, scrambled diction, extraordinary leaps of language and tone, and wild mixture of high lyricism and low comedy plumbed the extreme reaches of a human soul and psyche. In succeeding years Berryman added to the sequence, until there were nearly four hundred collected as The Dream Songs." |  | Modern American Poetry
Offers an overview of the poet's life and career, excerpts of interviews with Peter Stitt and John Plotz, and analysis and interpretation of Dream Songs.
"Berryman's reputation varied over his lifetime, from rising star, to a poet of unrealized promise who was largely excluded from anthologies, and finally in the last eight years of his life to the first rank of American poets, whose Dream Songs became a rare book-club poetry selection. The poet's acute insecurities and neuroses manifested themselves in his public persona as a braggart, a womanizer, a drunk, and an intellectual. But he unleashed the range of colloquial American language in his verse with a lyrical intensity that Lowell called 'more tearful and funny than we can easily bear.'" | |
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The TinL masthead features photography by
Natasha D'Schommer
, and the book art featured is by Jim Rosenau.
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