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Authors
John Berryman (1914-1972)
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Berryman’s Collected Poems: 1937–1971 appeared in 1991; John Berryman: Selected Poems, in 2004. Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956) and a selection of his Short Poems (1948) were issued together as a paperback in 1968. His other volumes of poetry include 77 Dream Songs (1964); Berryman’s Sonnets (1967); His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968); Love and Fame (1970; rev. 1972); Delusions, Etc. (1972); and a posthumous volume, Henry’s Fate (1977). Berryman’s critical biography, Stephen Crane, appeared in 1950, and a collection of his short fiction and literary essays was issued under the title The Freedom of the Poet (1976). Berryman’s unfinished novel about his alcoholism, Recovery, appeared in 1973. Valuable critical introductions to Berryman’s poetry can be found in Helen Vendler’s The Given and the Made (1995) and Thomas Travisano’s Midcentury Quartet (1999). Paul Mariani’s Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (1996) and Eileen Simpson’s Poets in Their Youth (1982) are useful biographical studies.
John Berryman spent the first ten years of his life near McAlester, Oklahoma, but then moved numerous times with his mother. He was haunted by the death of his father, who shot himself outside John's window when the boy was twelve. After graduating from Columbia College, Berryman attended Clare College in Cambridge, England, on a fellowship and went on to teach literature at Wayne State, Harvard, Princeton, and, until his own suicide at the age of fifty-nine, the University of Minnesota. Berryman is recognized for his use of many different personae in his work; for instance, in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet he offers his own version of Bradstreet's dramatic voice, and in his long work 77 Dream Songs (1964), he speaks through the voice of a blackface minstrel. The Dream Songs have the flavor of "psychic vaudeville" as the poet explores and presents himself through a series of alter egos. All told, Berryman published 385 Dream Songs; still others remain in manuscript form. Among his books of poetry are The Dispossessed (1948), Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956), and Love and Fame (1970).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Berryman and Anne Sexton are key figures in the mode loosely described as "confessional" or "confessionalist"; their poems often present painful personal experience and psychological responses which emanate from and relate chiefly to their private lives. Though both turned away from Emerson's premise of the poet as bard, speaker for a tribe, nation, or "us," Berryman and Sexton were unable to escape being public figures as their mental breakdowns and respective suicides drew attention to them and figured centrally in the commentary about their verse. This commentary often presents them as victims of modernity; much remains to be said about their verse forms and their use of the English language.
1. Review a few of Anne Bradstreet's poems in volume 1 of NAAL: Upon the Burning of Our House, To My Dear and Loving Husband, To Her Father with Some Verses, and the three elegies to her grandchildren. Then read stanzas 19-25 of Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Compare the voices in these poems: Bradstreet's own (public) voice, and Berryman's effort to offer us Bradstreet's private voice. Where is Berryman's language suggestive of Bradstreet's seventeenth-century diction? Where does he use more modern language? Some of the lines in Berryman's poem are complex and difficult to sort out grammatically and syntactically. Why would Berryman use lines of this sort to represent a poet known for the clarity of her own lines?
2. Compare Sexton's Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman (1964) to Berryman's Dream Song 385 (1968). Each poem addresses a member of the speaker's immediate family. Compare the way that these people are presented. If you were the daughter described in either of these poems, how would you feel about the publication of the poem? Here we encounter a complex question regarding confessional poetry and the presentation of living human beings on the printed page. What do you feel about this practice? Where else have you seen it?
3. Is Sexton's Sylvia's Death (1966) more about Sylvia Plath or about Anne Sexton? Which moments or motifs in the poem influence your answer? Compare this poem to other modern American elegies that you have read, by Robert Lowell, Williams, Moore, Roethke, or Hayden. What are some of the key differences between these poems and Sexton's?
