John Berryman

Who Was John Berryman?

John Berryman was one of the central figures of the confessional poetry movement and the author of one of the most ambitious and sustained lyric sequences in American literature. Born John Allyn Smith Jr. in McAlester, Oklahoma, he witnessed his father’s suicide at the age of twelve — an event that shaped his psychology and his poetry for the rest of his life. Educated at Columbia and Cambridge, he taught at Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Minnesota, where he spent the last years of his life.

His masterwork, The Dream Songs (1969), collects 385 songs featuring the alter ego Henry, a man of middle age who is haunted by loss, desire, guilt, and the recurring presence of death. The sequence is one of the great achievements of twentieth-century poetry: formally inventive, emotionally raw, intellectually demanding, and frequently very funny. It won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Berryman struggled with alcoholism throughout his adult life and died by suicide in 1972, jumping from a bridge in Minneapolis. In the years before his death he underwent a religious conversion and wrote a sequence of poems, Delusions, Etc. (1972), that represent his most direct engagement with Christian faith. The conversion was genuine but fragile, and it did not save him.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Homage to Mistress Bradstreet — 1956 — poem
• 77 Dream Songs — 1964 — Pulitzer Prize
• His Toy, His Dream, His Rest — 1968 — National Book Award
• The Dream Songs — 1969 — complete sequence
• Delusions, Etc. — 1972 — posthumous