[PDF] The Life Of John Berryman eBook

Author : John Haffenden
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 467 pages
File Size : 15,54 MB
Release : 2022-01-30
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 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in 1982, The Life of John Berryman draws on extensive research in the USA and on an enormous collection of hitherto unpublished materials – journals, letters, stories and poetry –to build a biography that recounts in absorbing detail the public and private stages of John Berry man’s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.

Author : John Berryman
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 469 pages
File Size : 13,40 MB
Release : 2014-10-21
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 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.

Author : John Berryman
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 737 pages
File Size : 31,79 MB
Release : 2020-10-13
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 0674976258

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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 : John Berryman
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 441 pages
File Size : 21,30 MB
Release : 2014-10-21
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 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.

Author : Eric Hoffman
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 30,60 MB
Release : 2021-03-15
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 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.

Author : Paul Mariani
Publisher : Trinity University Press
Page : 581 pages
File Size : 17,40 MB
Release : 2016-03-07
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1595347674

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Dream Song is the story of John Berryman, one of the most gifted poets of a generation that included Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and Dylan Thomas. Using Berryman's unpublished letters and poetry, as well as interviews with those who knew him intimately, Paul Mariani captures Berryman's genius and the tragedy that dogged him, while at the same time illuminating one of the most provocative periods in American letters. Here we witness Berryman's struggles with alcohol and drugs, his obsession with women and fame, and his friendships with luminary writers of the century. Mariani creates an unforgettable portrait of a poet who, by the time of his suicide at age fifty-seven, had won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

Author : Eileen Simpson
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 363 pages
File Size : 41,30 MB
Release : 2014-10-21
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0374713006

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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 : Macmillan
Page : 109 pages
File Size : 36,42 MB
Release : 1970
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 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.

Author : John Berryman
Publisher : Macmillan
Page : 82 pages
File Size : 43,76 MB
Release : 1972
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 0374137986

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Poetry by John Berryman including the poems under "Opus Dei" and "Scherzo."

Author : Philip Coleman
Publisher : Rodopi
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 18,83 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9042022191

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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.