John Berryman, a talented scholar driven to write poetry, is best known for transforming his personal suffering into verse. Like Robert Frost and Randall Jarrell, he loved teaching poetry and felt most at home with literature and the humanities. For his own composition, he was adept at the song and sonnet but preferred large dramatic roles that altered his identity. He was influenced by Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. H. Auden, William Butler Yeats, and e. e. cummings; his aberrant syntax and multilevel language produced a poetic exhibitionism consistent with a flawed past and troubled mind.
At his birth on October 25, 1914, in McAlester, Oklahoma, the poet bore the surname of his parents, teacher Martha Little and John Allyn Smith, a bank examiner. In 1924, bankrolled by Martha’s mother, his family moved to Tampa, Florida. In 1926, his father sank into despair over unwise speculation in real estate. One morning, he shot himself in the head outside his elder son’s bedroom window. Berryman later wrote, “A bullet on a concrete stoop / close by a smothering southern sea / spreadeagled on an island, by my knee.” Berryman suffered insomnia as he relived his family’s pain.
Within ten weeks of his father’s death, Berryman and his mother and brother resettled in Queens, New York, where he took the surname of his stepfather, bond dealer John Angus Berryman. He attended South Kent, a boarding school in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in his early teens. He lapsed into fainting spells and faked epileptic seizures; his willful craziness set the pattern of his mature years.
Adult success brought Berryman fame and some degree of self-respect. At 21, he published his first poems in The Columbia Review. While completing a degree at Columbia University, he studied under Mark Van Doren. On a Kellett Fellowship, Berryman studied at Clare College, Cambridge, where he became the rare American to win the Oldham Shakespeare Scholarship. He launched a lengthy and distinguished teaching career, which took him to Wayne State, Harvard, Princeton, Brown, the universities of Washington and Connecticut, and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. During his classroom career, he completed a much-debated psychoanalytic biography, Stephen Crane (1950), which revived interest in Crane as a poet.
Dubbed a confessional poet, Berryman produced verse for thirty-five years, publishing Poems (1942), The Dispossessed (1948), and an early masterwork, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956), a 57-stanza hymn to New England’s Anne Bradstreet, which he wrote while living in Princeton, New Jersey. Inspired by Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, his lyric sequence, 77 Dream Songs (1964), won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for poetry; four years later, he earned a National Book Award for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest: 308 Dream Songs (1968), a second immersion in dream states. Intensely personal, the poems relive a child’s attempt to establish order in a disintegrating family. The most hopeless stave, number 145, speaks of the imaginary character through which the poet projects misgivings about life and sanity. Narcissistic and self-serving, Dream Songs characterizes Berryman’s debilitating need for a prop, whether grandstanding, alcohol, fantasy, or poetry.
Severely limited by faltering energy, nightmares, and hallucinations, Berryman rallied into manic overproduction in Love and Fame (1970) and an incomplete novel, Recovery (1973), ostensibly an autobiography about his defeat of the demons that stalked him. Repeatedly combating premonitions of death, convulsive rages, and addictive behavior, he committed suicide on January 7, 1972, in Minneapolis, by leaping from a bridge into the frozen Mississippi River. A posthumous work, Henry’s Fate, was published in 1972. Four years later, Berryman’s critical essays were issued as The Freedom of the Poet (1976).
