The Dream Songs
The Dream Songs

Author: John Berryman

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2014-10-21

Total Pages: 469

ISBN-13: 1466879637

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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.

The Life of John Berryman
The Life of John Berryman

Author: John Haffenden

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-01-30

Total Pages: 467

ISBN-13: 1000534898

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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in 1982, The Life of John Berryman draws on extensive research in the USA and on an enormous collection of hitherto unpublished materials – journals, letters, stories and poetry –to build a biography that recounts in absorbing detail the public and private stages of John Berry man’s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.

John Berryman: Collected Poems
John Berryman: Collected Poems

Author: John Berryman

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2014-10-21

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 1466879580

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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.

His Toy, His Dream, His Rest
His Toy, His Dream, His Rest

Author: John Berryman

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2014-10-21

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 1466879564

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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."

Conversations with John Berryman
Conversations with John Berryman

Author: Eric Hoffman

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2021-03-15

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1496831470

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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.

Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

Author: John Berryman

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2014-10-21

Total Pages: 114

ISBN-13: 1466879572

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This volume represents the first appearance in paperback of one of America's most outstanding poets, John Berryman. It contains, besides the long title poem, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, the major portion of Short Poems; a selection from The Dispossessed, which drew on two earlier collections; some poems from His Thought Made Pockets & The Plane Buckt; and one poem from Sonnets. "It seems to me the most distinguished long poem by an American since The Waste Land." - Edmund Wilson

Love & Fame
Love & Fame

Author: John Berryman

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 1970

Total Pages: 109

ISBN-13: 0374192332

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Fifty-nine lyrical works in which the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet describes the creative process, politics, and the struggle of maintaining life.

John Berryman: Selected Poems
John Berryman: Selected Poems

Author: John Berryman

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2004-11-04

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1931082693

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“Staggering, swaggering, intoxicating”: John Berryman achieved a poetry where (in the words of editor Kevin Young) “protagonists search for a lover or friend, ancestor or listener, with a recklessness that only Whitman allowed himself. . . . Berryman becomes Everyman attempting, falling short of, and often achieving greatness." Young’s selection, the first new selection of Berryman’s poems in over 30 years, encompasses the formal accomplishments of his early work, epitomized in the masterful Homage to Mistress Bradstreet; the explosive and mesmerizing diction of Dream Songs, and his wrenching religious poems. At once traditional and radical, Berryman was a master of technique who remade language with gusto. No poet of his time wrote more distinctively or inventively, or with more relentless intensity. With its formal exuberance and its uncompromising, often heartbreaking expressiveness, his poetry continues to surprise and challenge. About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.