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
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, long poem by John Berryman, written in 1948–53 and published in 1956. Noted for its intensity, it is a tribute to colonial poet Anne Bradstreet that also reveals much about the author. The poem examines the tension between Bradstreet’s personal life and her artistic life, concluding in a spirit of fatalism. It shows throughout a loving and intimate grasp of the details of American history. The work primarily examines creative repression, religious apostasy, and the temptation to adultery.
Though her work is a staple of anthologies of American poetry, Anne Bradstreet has never before been the subject of an accessible, full-scale biography for a general audience. Anne Bradstreet is known for her poem, To My Dear and Loving Husband, among others, and through John Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. With her first collection, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, she became the first published poet, male or female, of the New World. Many New England towns were founded and settled by Anne Bradstreet's family or their close associates -- characters who appear in these pages.
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.
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.
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.
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.
