The Life Of John Berryman

Author : John Haffenden
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 467 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2022-01-30
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9781000534894

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The Life of John Berryman by John Haffenden Pdf

First published in 1982, The Life of John Berryman draws on extensive research in the USA and on an enormous collection of hitherto unpublished materials – journals, letters, stories and poetry –to build a biography that recounts in absorbing detail the public and private stages of John Berry man’s career. It also offers an intimate portrait of a creative artist: his compulsive self-presentation and self-reproach, his moral and artistic dilemmas, his dedication and his accomplishments. John Berryman occupies a central place among the outstanding poets of recent times. The course of his life ran between the extremes of personal degradation and artistic ecstasy. He suffered the early suicide of his father, the dominance of his mother, poverty and professional setbacks, psychiatric treatment, alcoholism, and sexual and spiritual vexation. He became an electrifying, fearful teacher and a loving, jealous friend. His mentors and close associates included Mark Van Doren, Richard Blackmur, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell and Saul Bellow. The years brought him spells of deep personal joy and artistic fulfilment, but all too heavy a hand of terrible suffering. The book will be an extremely interesting read for students of literature.

Author : John Berryman
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 469 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2014-10-21
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9781466879638

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The Dream Songs by John Berryman Pdf

The complete Dream Songs--hypnotic, seductive, masterful--as thrilling to read now as they ever were John Berryman's The Dream Songs are perhaps the funniest, saddest, most intricately wrought cycle of oems by an American in the twentieth century. They are also, more simply, the vibrantly sketched adventures of a uniquely American antihero named Henry. Henry falls in and out of love, and is in and out of the hospital; he sings of joy and desire, and of beings at odds with the world. He is lustful; he is depressed. And while Henry is breaking down and cracking up and patching himself together again, Berryman is doing the same thing to the English language, crafting electric verses that defy grammar but resound with an intuitive truth: "if he had a hundred years," Henry despairs in "Dream Song 29," "& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time / Henry could not make good." This volume collects both 77 Dream Songs, which won Berryman the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, and their continuation, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which was awarded the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize in 1969. The Dream Songs are witty and wild, an account of madness shot through with searing insight, winking word play, and moments of pure, soaring elation. This is a brilliantly sustained and profoundly moving performance that has not yet-and may never be-equaled.

Author : Paul L. Mariani
Publisher : William Morrow
Page : 710 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 1990
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : UOM:39015016960257

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Dream Song by Paul L. Mariani Pdf

"The best single volume on Berryman's life and work". -- Kirkus Reviews

Author : John Berryman
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 737 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2020-10-13
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780674976252

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The Selected Letters of John Berryman by John Berryman Pdf

A wide-ranging, first-of-its-kind selection of Berryman’s correspondence with friends, loved ones, writers, and editors, showcasing the turbulent, fascinating life and mind of one of America’s major poets. The Selected Letters of John Berryman assembles for the first time the poet’s voluminous correspondence. Beginning with a letter to his parents in 1925 and concluding with a letter sent a few weeks before his death in 1972, Berryman tells his story in his own words. Included are more than 600 letters to almost 200 people—editors, family members, students, colleagues, and friends. The exchanges reveal the scope of Berryman’s ambitions, as well as the challenges of practicing his art within the confines of the publishing industry and contemporary critical expectations. Correspondence with Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Adrienne Rich, Saul Bellow, and other writers demonstrates Berryman’s sustained involvement in the development of literary culture in the postwar United States. We also see Berryman responding in detail to the work of writers such as Carolyn Kizer and William Meredith and encouraging the next generation—Edward Hoagland, Valerie Trueblood, and others. The letters show Berryman to be an energetic and generous interlocutor, but they also make plain his struggles with personal and familial trauma, at every stage of his career. An introduction by editors Philip Coleman and Calista McRae explains the careful selection of letters and contextualizes the materials within Berryman’s career. Reinforcing the critical and creative interconnectedness of Berryman’s work and personal life, The Selected Letters confirms his place as one of the most original voices of his generation and opens new horizons for appreciating and interpreting his poems.

Author : Eileen Simpson
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 363 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2014-10-21
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780374713003

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Poets in Their Youth by Eileen Simpson Pdf

In 1942, Eileen Simpson—then Eileen Mulligan—married John Berryman. Both were in their twenties; Eileen had just graduated from Hunter College and John had but one slim volume of poetry to his name. They moved frequently—from New York to Boston, then Princeton—chasing jobs, living simply, relying on the hospitality of more successful friends like Robert Lowell and Jean Stafford, or R. P. Blackmur and his wife, Helen. Rounding out their circle of intimates were other struggling poets like Randall Jarrell and Delmore Schwartz. Berryman alternately wrote and despaired of writing. Everyone stayed up late arguing about poetry. Poets in Their Youth is a portrait of their marriage, yes, but it is also a portrait of a group of spectacularly intelligent friends at a particular time, in a particular place, all aflame with literature. Simpson's recollections are so tender, her narrative so generous, it is almost possible to imagine the story has a different ending—even as Schwartz's marriage crumbles, as Lowell succumbs to a manic episode, as her own relationship with Berryman buckles under the strain of his drinking, his infidelity, his depression. Filled with winning anecdotes and moments of startling poignancy, Simpson's now classic memoir shows some of the most brilliant literary minds of the second half of the twentieth century at their brightest and most achingly human.

Author : John Berryman
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 145 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2014-10-21
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9781466879621

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Berryman's Sonnets by John Berryman Pdf

A brilliant and fiercely pitched sonnet cycle about love: at once passionate, forbidden, and doomed John Berryman was an unconventional poet, but he must have surprised even himself when, in his thirties, he found he was suddenly compelled to write sonnets. It was an unusual choice—even an unpopular one—for a poet in a midcentury American literary scene that was less interested in forms. But it was the right choice, for Berryman found himself in a situation that called for the sonnet: after several years of a happy marriage, he had fallen helplessly, hopelessly in love with the young wife of a colleague. "Passion sought; passion requited; passion delayed; and, finally, passion utterly thwarted": this is how the poet April Bernard, in her vivid, intimate introduction, characterizes the sonnet cycle, and it is the cycle that Berryman found himself caught up in. Of course the affair was doomed to end, and end badly. But in the meantime, on the page Berryman performs a spectacular dance of tender, obsessive, impossible love in his "characteristic tonal mixture of bravado and lacerating shame-facedness." Here is the poet as lover, genius, and also, in Bernard's words, as nutcase. In Berryman's Sonnets, the poet draws on the models of Petrarch and Sidney to reanimate and reimagine the love-sonnet sequence. Complex, passionate, filled with verbal fireworks and the emotional strains of joy, terror, guilt, and longing, these poems are ripe for rediscovery by contemporary readers.

Author : John Berryman
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 441 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2014-10-21
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9781466879584

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John Berryman: Collected Poems by John Berryman Pdf

This volume brings together all of John Berryman's poetry, except for his epic The Dream Songs, ranging from his earliest unpublished poem (1934) to those written in the last months of his life (1972). John Berryman: Collected Poems 1937-1971 is a definitive edition of one of America's most distinguished poets.

Author : Philip Coleman,Philip McGowan
Publisher : Rodopi
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9789042022195

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"After Thirty Falls" by Philip Coleman,Philip McGowan Pdf

Prefaced by an account of the early days of Berryman studies by bibliographer and scholar Richard J. Kelly, "After thirty Falls" is the first collection of essays to be published on the American poet John Berryman (1914-1972) in over a decade. The book seeks to provoke new interest in this important figure with a group of original essays and appraisals by scholars from Ireland, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and the United States. Exploring such areas as the poet's engagements with Shakespeare and the American sonnet tradition, his use of the Trickster figure and the idea of performance in his poetics, it expands the interpretive framework by which Berryman may be evaluated and studied, and it will be of interest to students of modern American poetry at all levels. What makes the collection particularly valuable is its inclusion of previously unpublished material - including a translation of a poem by Catullus and excerpts from the poet's detailed notes on the life of Christ - thereby providing new contexts for future assessments of Berryman's contribution to the development of poetry, poetics, and the relationship between scholarship and other forms of writing in the twentieth century.

Author : John Berryman
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2014-10-21
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9780374713591

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The Heart Is Strange by John Berryman Pdf

A lively sampling from the work of one of the most celebrated and daring poets of the twentieth century John Berryman was perhaps the most idiosyncratic American poet of the twentieth century. Best known for the painfully sad and raucously funny cycle of Dream Songs, he wrote passionately: of love and despair, of grief and laughter, of longing for a better world and coming to terms with this one. The Heart Is Strange, a new selection of his poems, along with reissues of Berryman's Sonnets, 77 Dream Songs, and the complete Dream Songs, marks the centenary of his birth. The Heart Is Strange includes a generous selection from across Berryman's varied career: from his earliest poems, which show him learning the craft, to his breakthrough masterpiece, "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet," then to his mature verses, which find the poet looking back upon his lovers and youthful passions, and finally, to his late poems, in which he battles with sobriety and an increasingly religious sensibility. The defiant joy and wild genius of Berryman's work has been obscured by his struggles with mental illness and alcohol, his tempestuous relationships with women, and his suicide. This volume, which includes three previously uncollected poems and an insightful introduction by the editor Daniel Swift, celebrates the whole Berryman: tortured poet and teasing father, passionate lover and melancholy scholar. It is a perfect introduction to one of the finest bodies of work yet produced by an American poet.

Author : John Berryman
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 334 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2014-10-21
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9781466879560

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His Toy, His Dream, His Rest by John Berryman Pdf

His Toy, His Dream, His Rest continues and concludes John Berryman's poem called The Dream Songs, begun in 77 Dream Songs, which was published in 1964 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. This longer volume contains 308 songs in all, starting, of course, with number 78. "Some of the people who addressed themselves to 77 Dream Songs went so desperately astray," writes the author, "that I permit myself one word. The poem then, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants therof. Requiescant in pace."

Author : John Berryman
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 454 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2000-12-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781466808119

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Berryman's Shakespeare by John Berryman Pdf

Edited by John Haffenden With a Preface by Robert Giroux John Berryman, one of America's most talented modern poets, was winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs and the National Book Award for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. He gained a reputation as an innovator whose bold literary adventures were tempered by exacting discipline. Berryman was also an active, prolific, and perceptive critic whose own experience as a major poet served to his advantage. Berryman was a protégé of Mark Van Doren, the great Shakespearean scholar, and the Bard's work remained one of his most abiding passions--he would devote a lifetime to writing about it. His voluminous writings on the subject have now been collected and edited by John Haffenden.

Author : John Berryman
Publisher : Hill and Wang
Page : 397 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 1982-10-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781466808065

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Stephen Crane by John Berryman Pdf

This is the only biography by a leading American poet of the great American writer, Stephen Crane. John Berryman originally wrote this book in 1950 for the distinguished "American Men of Letters" series, and revised it twelve years later. This edition reproduces the later version. In Stephen Crane, Berryman assesses the writings and life of a man whose work has been one of the most powerful influences on modern writers. As Edmund Wilson said in The New Yorker, "Mr. Berryman's work is an important one, and not merely because at the moment it stands alone...We are not likely soon to get anything better on the critical and psychological sides." It is Berryman's special insight into Crane as a poet that makes this book unique.

Author : Eric Hoffman
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2021-03-15
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781496831477

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Conversations with John Berryman by Eric Hoffman Pdf

The poetry of John Berryman (1914–1972) is primarily concerned with the self in response to the rapid social, political, sexual, racial, and technological transformations of the twentieth century, and their impact on the psyche and spirit, both individual and collective. He was just as likely to find inspiration in his local newspaper as he was from the poetry of Hopkins or Milton. In fact, in contrast to the popular perception of Berryman drunkenly composing strange, dreamlike, abstract, esoteric poems, Berryman was intensely aware of craft. His best work routinely utilizes a variety of rhetorical styles, shifting effortlessly from the lyric to the prosaic. For Berryman, poetry was nothing less than a vocation, a mission, and a way of life. Though he desired fame, he acknowledged its relative unimportance when he stated that the “important thing is that your work is something no one else can do.” As a result, Berryman very rarely granted interviews—“I teach and I write,” he explained, “I’m not copy”—yet when he did the results were always captivating. Collected in Conversations with John Berryman are all of Berryman’s major interviews, personality pieces, profiles, and local interest items, where interviewers attempt to unravel him, as both Berryman and his interlocutors struggle to find value in poetry in a fallen world.

Author : John Berryman
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 88 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 0571217818

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Poems by John Berryman Pdf

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets in our literature. John Berryman (1914-72) was a poet from an immensely gifted generation of American poets that included Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and Elizabeth Bishop. His long sequence The Dream Songs has become an enduring landmark in American poetry and a tribute to Berryman's own endurance in the face of alcoholism, depression and mental instability. In 1972 he leaped to his death from a bridge above the Mississippi River.

Author : John Berryman,Mrs. Berryman
Publisher : New York : Norton
Page : 464 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 1988
Category : Mothers
ISBN : UOM:39015014289642

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We Dream of Honour by John Berryman,Mrs. Berryman Pdf