John Berryman

John Berryman ( Born John Allyn Smith)
Born in born in McAlester, Oklahoma October 25, 1914 – January 7, 1972
Active 1942-1972
Founder of the confessional school of poetry

Biography
John Allyn Smith was born in 1914 in Oklahoma to John Allyn Smith Senior and Martha Little Smith. When he was 12, his father shot himself outside of John’s window. His mother moved to Florida where she remarried and John Allyn Smith became John Berryman. Berryman attended the South Kent boarding school, and eventually went to Columbia University for an English degree. While at Columbia he accomplished two things, becoming an alcoholic and writing for literary journals. After attending Columbia he went to Clare University in Cambridge on a scholarship he received.

After this year, he became diagnosed with epilepsy and depression.
He taught at several colleges such as Harvard and Princeton.

He married Eileen Patricia Mulligan in the 1940s.

His wife eventually left him and he turned even more to alcohol, now spending nights in jail and failing to show up for the writers’ workshops he taught at the University of Iowa. The university eventually forced him to resign. Allan Tate offered him a position at the University of Minnesota where he taught until his untimely death. It was here where he remarried, twice. To Anne Levine, then Kate Donahue. All together he had 2 daughters and a son.

Like his life, his poetry was also tormented and brilliant, taking great liberties with syntax and rich with inner angst. His most notable work is “The Dream Songs” where he writes what most believe to be an autobiography of sorts with him being represented by the main character Henry. Henry, like Berryman, has to deal with alcoholism and paternal suicide.

In his later years his alcoholism and depression made him unable to speak at readings and even write poems. Eventually from all this he killed himself by jumping off the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minnesota.

Throughout his life he won the following awards: Oldham Shakespeare Prize, Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial award (1948), American Academy award for poetry (1950), National Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1950), the Levinson Prize (1950), the Guggenheim Fellowship (1952, 1966), Academy of American Poets, The Pulitzer Prize (1964), National Endowment for the Arts award (1967), National Book Award (1969), and the Bollingen Award (1969).

Works consulted:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Berryman
http://project1.caryacademy.org/echoes/03-04/John_Berryman/DefaultJohn_Berryman.htm
http://www.answers.com/topic/john-berryman
Modern Critical Views- John Berryman, by Harold Bloom

Works
Poems (Norfolk, Ct.: New Directions Press, 1942)
The Dispossessed (New York: William Sloan Associates, 1948)
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1956)
77 Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964)
Berryman's Sonnets (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967)
The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969)
His Toy, His Dream His Rest (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969)
Love & Fame (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970)
Delusions, Etc. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972)

Moods
Autumnal- “I am outside/incredible panic rules. /People are blowing and beating each other without mercy”
Depressed- “Bright eyed and bushy tailed woke not Henry up/…Alone. They all abandoned Henry.”
Eerie- “A fortnight later, sense a single man/upon the trampled scene at 2 a.m./insomnia plagued with a shovel/digging like mad, Lazarus with a plan” (about digging up a corpse).
Morbid- “The iron pear which rammed into his mouth/swells up to four times ordinary size/slowly cracking his skull open”
Reflective- “My mother was scared almost to death, he was going to swim out with me, forevers” (His father had threatened to drown himself and John), and on his fathers suicide “Never see my son/easy be not to see anyone/combers out to see/know they’re goin somewhere but not me/got a little poison, got a little gun.”
Wry- “I am so wise I had my mouth sewn shut…I am teenage cancer, with a plan”


Style
Confessional- Confessional poetry began in the 1950s and 1960s by poets such as John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell. In this genre poets exposed themselves and their emotions rather than using the poem as a mask. The poetry explored details about the writers’ life with out holding back. The results were sometimes ugly, always candid with confessions about sex, life, depression, and haunting memories. This may be why the genre is considered a way for the writer to “out their demons”. Many poets in this genre had great private distress, and it is notable that most of the great founders of it killed themselves (Plath, Berryman, and Sexton). That is why this genre is so well read; it combines private pity and torment with public poetic form and art.
Berrymans whole book “The Dream Songs” is an example of this genre, discussing his fathers’ death, and feelings of alienation in real life. Berryman makes the main character in the book, Henry represent him. Henry feels and goes through many of the things that happened to Berryman if one looks up a biography about Berryman. Berryman lost his rigid syntax in this book and instead adapted a chaotic blend of syntax, tone, diction, humor, and wrenching sorrow as he plunged deeper into his psyche in this book.


Similar Artists
Followers-
Marie Howe- Marie Howe is a current poet, who writes books about real issues in her life. Her book “What the Living Do” reflects upon her brothers’ death from AIDS in a series of poems and essays. It is said to be “a haunting lament for her brother with the plain-spoken last line: ‘I am living, I remember you.’” She, like Berryman, explores relationships and attachment in personal terms in their poetry.

Influenced by-
Allen Tate- Allen Tate influenced Berryman. Tate, one of the founders of modern poetry, was a mentor to Berryman. He also was a professor at the University of Minnesota. His poems were extremely personal, filled with reflection upon himself. He often focused on ideas such as death, spiritual rebirth, and alienation. These themes and reflection are present in Berryman’s work.

Yeats- Berryman once said, “I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.” And “Then came Yeats, who I didn’t so much wish to resemble as to be”. What more proof is needed that Berryman emulated Yeats? One of the most common examples is comparing Yeats’ “Crazy Jane” to Berryman’s poem “Young Woman’s Song”. His most notable work, “The Dream Songs” takes it’s stanza layout from Yeats, said Berryman in an interview. And, like Yeats, Berryman used great technical control in poems.