John Berryman
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One of the most astonishing things about this astonishing book is that it follows so closely in time the enormous achievement of the author's Dream Songs, the first part of which 77 Dream Songs, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965 and the second part, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, the National Book Award for Poetry in 1969.
Love & Fame is written in a style new for Berryman, new for anybody. The poet talks of his beginnings as an artist' of...
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This volume represents the first appearance in paperback of one of America's most outstanding poets, John Berryman. It contains, besides the long title poem, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, the major portion of Short Poems; a selection from The Dispossessed, which drew on two earlier collections; some poems from His Thought Made Pockets & The Plane Buckt; and one poem from Sonnets.
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This is the only biography by a leading American poet of the great American writer, Stephen Crane. John Berryman originally wrote this book in 1950 for the distinguished "American Men of Letters" series, and revised it twelve years later. This edition reproduces the later version.
In Stephen Crane, Berryman assesses the writings and life of a man whose work has been one of the most powerful influences on modern writers. As Edmund Wilson said in The...
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His Toy, His Dream, His Rest continues and concludes the poem, called The Dream Songs, begun in 77 Dream Songs, which was published in 1964 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. It is a much longer volume than the earlier one and contains 308 songs in all, starting of course with number 78.
"Some of the people who addressed themselves to 77 Dream Songs went so desperately astray," writes the author, "that I permit myself one word. The poem then,...
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Edited by John Haffenden
With a Preface by Robert Giroux
John Berryman, one of America's most talented modern poets, was winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs and the National Book Award for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. He gained a reputation as an innovator whose bold literary adventures were tempered by exacting discipline. Berryman was also an active, prolific, and perceptive critic whose own experience as a major poet served to his...
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Mr. Berryman's posthumous book of poems, Delusions, Etc., had been completed and was in proof before his death on January 7, 1972. The opening section, "Opus Dei," is a sequence of eight poems based on the offices of the day from Lauds to Compline-the lines above being quoted from Nones. Part two consists of five poems whose subject are George Washington ("Rectitude, and the terrible upstanding member"), Beethoven, Emily Dickinson, Georg Trakl, and...
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A lively sampling from the work of one of the most celebrated and daring poets of the twentieth century
John Berryman was perhaps the most idiosyncratic American poet of the twentieth century. Best known for the painfully sad and raucously funny cycle of Dream Songs, he wrote passionately: of love and despair, of grief and laughter, of longing for a better world and coming to terms with this one. The Heart Is Strange, a new selection of his poems,...
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A wild, masterful cycle of poems that half a century later still shocks and astounds.
As Henri Cole notes in his elegant, perceptive introduction, Berryman had discovered "a looser style that mixed high and low dictions with a strange syntax." Berryman had also discovered his most enduring alter ego, a paranoid, passionate, depressed, drunk, irrepressible antihero named Henry or, sometimes, Mr. Bones: "We touch at certain points," Berryman claimed,...
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A brilliant and fiercely pitched sonnet cycle about love: at once passionate, forbidden, and doomed
John Berryman was an unconventional poet, but he must have surprised even himself when, in his thirties, he found he was suddenly compelled to write sonnets. It was an unusual choice-even an unpopular one-for a poet in a midcentury American literary scene that was less interested in forms. But it was the right choice, for Berryman found himself in a...
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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.
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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...
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Less than a year before his death in 1972, John Berryman signed a contract with his publisher for a book of prose, The Freedom of the Poet, for which he had made a selection from his published and unpublished writings. In his draft of a prefatory note, he acknowledged the influence of Eliot, Blackmur, Pound, and Empson on his critical thought, pointing out that "my interest in critical theory has been slight," and concluding: "But I have also borne...
14) Short Poems
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This collection brings together in a single volume a wide range of John Berryman's earlier work. It includes the complete contents of The Dispossessed, a selection published in 1948, which has been out of print; and all the poems in His Thought Made Pockets & the Plane Buckt, privately issued in a limited edition in 1958; and "Formal Elegy," written in 1963, on the occasion of the death of President Kennedy. There are sixty-four poems in all.