John Berryman (1914-1972)

A scholar and professor as well as a poet, John Berryman (1914–1972) is best-known for The Dream Songs, an intensely personal sequence of 385 poems which brought him the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. In these he invented a style and form able to accommodate a vast range of material while expressing his turbulent emotions. Made up of three six-line stanzas that teem with allusions to past and present events and to literary figures, The Dream Songs display an astonishing variety of poetic resources that include slangy diction and a nervous, fractured syntax. Berryman studied at Columbia University and Cambridge University in England. After teaching stints at Harvard and Princeton, Berryman took a position at the University of Minnesota, where he remained until his death. His poems are influenced by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, psychoanalysis, and Shakespeare, whose plays and poems Berryman frequently taught.

POEMS
Dream Song 14