John Berryman

John Allyn McAlpin Berryman (born John Allyn Smith, Jr.; October 25, 1914 – January 7, 1972) was an American poet and scholar.

He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in the "confessional" school of poetry.

His best-known work is The Dream Songs.

John Berryman was born on October 25, 1914, in McAlester, Oklahoma, where he was raised until the age of ten, when his father, John Smith, a banker, and his mother, Martha (also known as Peggy), a schoolteacher, moved to Florida.

In 1926, in Clearwater, Florida, when Berryman was 11 years old, his father shot and killed himself.

Smith was jobless at the time, and he and Martha were filing for divorce.

Berryman was haunted by his father's death for the rest of his life and wrote about his struggle to come to terms with it in much of his poetry.

In "Dream Song #143", he wrote, "That mad drive [to commit suicide] wiped out my childhood. I put him down/while all the same on forty years I love him/stashed in Oklahoma/besides his brother Will".

In "Dream Song #145", he also wrote of his father:

Similarly, in Dream Song #384, Berryman wrote:

After his father's death at the rear entrance to Kipling Arms, where the Smiths rented an apartment, the poet's mother, within months, married John Angus McAlpin Berryman in New York City.

The poet was renamed John Allyn McAlpin Berryman.

Berryman's mother also changed her first name from Peggy to Jill.

Although his stepfather later divorced his mother, Berryman and his stepfather stayed on good terms.

With both his mother and stepfather working, his mother decided to send him to the South Kent School, a private boarding school in Connecticut.

Berryman then attended Columbia College, where he was president of the Philolexian Society, joined the Boar's Head Society, edited The Columbia Review, and studied under the literary scholar and poet Mark Van Doren.

Berryman later credited Van Doren with sparking his interest in writing poetry seriously.

For two years, Berryman also studied overseas at Clare College, Cambridge, on a Kellett Fellowship from Columbia.

He graduated in 1936.

Berryman's early work formed part of a volume titled Five Young American Poets, published by New Directions in 1940.

One of the other young poets included in the book was Randall Jarrell.

Berryman published some of this early verse in his first book, Poems, in 1942.

His first mature collection of poems, The Dispossessed, appeared six years later, published by William Sloane Associates.

The book received largely negative reviews from poets like Jarrell, who wrote, in The Nation, that Berryman was "a complicated, nervous, and intelligent [poet]" whose work was too derivative of W. B. Yeats.

Berryman later concurred with this assessment of his early work, saying, "I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats."

In October 1942, Berryman married Eileen Mulligan (later Simpson) in a ceremony at St. Patrick's Cathedral, with Van Doren as his best man.

The couple moved to Beacon Hill, and Berryman lectured at Harvard.

In 1947, Berryman started an affair with a married woman named Chris Haynes, documented in a long sonnet sequence that he refrained from publishing in part because that would have revealed the affair to his wife.

In 1950, Berryman published a biography of the fiction writer and poet Stephen Crane, whom he greatly admired.

The marriage ended in 1953 (the divorce was formalized in 1956), when Simpson finally grew weary of Berryman's affairs and acting as "net-holder" during his self-destructive personal crises.

The book was followed by his next significant poem, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956), which featured illustrations by the artist Ben Shahn and was Berryman's first poem to receive "national attention" and a positive response from critics.

Edmund Wilson wrote that it was "the most distinguished long poem by an American since T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land."

When Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and Other Poems was published in 1959, the poet Conrad Aiken praised the book's shorter poems, which he found superior to "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet".

Despite his third book of verse's relative success, Berryman's great poetic breakthrough occurred with 77 Dream Songs (1964).

It won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and solidified Berryman's standing as one of the most important poets of the post-World War II generation that included Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Delmore Schwartz.

Soon thereafter, the press began to give Berryman a great deal of attention, as did arts organizations and even the White House, which sent him an invitation to dine with President Lyndon B. Johnson (though Berryman declined because he was in Ireland at the time).

He eventually published the work, Berryman's Sonnets, in 1967.

It includes over one hundred sonnets.

Berryman was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967, and that same year Life magazine ran a feature story on him.

Simpson memorialized her time with Berryman and his circle in her 1982 book Poets in Their Youth.