Author: John BerrymanPublisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374169500
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 113
Book Description
Henry's Fate & Other Poems, 1967-1972
Author: John BerrymanPublisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374169500
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 113
Book Description
Henry's Fate and Other Poems
Author: John BerrymanPublisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466879556
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 113
Book Description
The poems in this posthumous collection were written by John Berryman between 1967 and 1972, the year of his death. The first group consists of forty-five unpublished or uncollected Dream Songs, included the title poem, "Henry's Fate." The second part includes eleven short poems; the third is devoted to unfinished longer poems, one of which is the extraordinary draft version of "Washington in Love," more ambitious in scope and intention than the version Berryman published in Delusions, Etc.This section also includes the "Proemio"to a poem addressed to his children, which Berryman was planning as "my third epic," after Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and The Dream Songs. The fourth and final section consists of ten poems of the later period, including "The Alcoholic in the 3rd Week of the 3rd Treatment," and "I didn't," a poem written within forty-eight hours of his death. Henry's Fate and Other Poems has been compiled by John Haffenden, poet and critic, who is at work on the authorized biography of Berrman. In his introduction he reveals that a number of poems turned up in unlikely places: " Old Codger Henry' was found, for example, on a scrap of envelope tucked away in an edition of Coleridge." He cites a satirical epitaph Berryman wrote on himself as early as 1955: "He was a poet. To earn a living--instead of scrounging as he should have done--he lectured on subjects he knew nothing about to students incapable of learning anything." He feels that Berryman "embodied in his life the truth of his own phrase, 'The happier you get the worse you feel.'"
The Dream Songs
Author: John BerrymanPublisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466879637
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 469
Book Description
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.
Conversations with John Berryman
Author: Eric HoffmanPublisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496831454
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 178
Book Description
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.
American Poetry after Modernism
Author: Albert GelpiPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107025249
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327
Book Description
Albert Gelpi's American Poetry after Modernism is a study of sixteen major American poets of the postwar period, from Robert Lowell to Adrienne Rich. Gelpi argues that a distinctly American poetic tradition was solidified in the later half the twentieth century, thus severing it from British conventions.
The Life of John Berryman
Author: John HaffendenPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000534928
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 451
Book Description
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.
Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
Author: Eric L. HaralsonPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317763211
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 2479
Book Description
The Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century contains over 400 entries that treat a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the century. Entries fall into three main categories: poet entries, which provide biographical and cultural contexts for the author's career; entries on individual works, which offer closer explication of the most resonant poems in the 20th-century canon; and topical entries, which offer analyses of a given period of literary production, school, thematically constructed category, or other verse tradition that historically has been in dialogue with the poetry of the United States.
John Berryman: Collected Poems
Author: John BerrymanPublisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466879580
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 441
Book Description
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.
Contemporary American Poetry
Author: Lloyd M. DavisPublisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 9780810818293
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Book Description
Lists over 5,200 titles of books published by American poets between 1973 and 1983.
Part of Nature, Part of Us
Author: Helen VendlerPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674654761
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Book Description
A collection of book reviews and essays on more than forty modern American poets.
