Collected Poems, 1937-1971 - Hardcover

John Berryman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374126194 ISBN 13: 9780374126193

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989

Synopsis

This volume brings together all of Berryman’s poetry, except for his epic The Dream Songs, ranging from his earliest unpublished poem (1934) to those written in the last months of his life (1972). A definitive edition of one of America’s most distinguishe

About this title

About the Author:

John Berryman (1914-72) was born John Smith in McAlester, Oklahoma, and educated at Colombia College and Cambridge University. He later held posts at Harvard and Princeton, before taking up a professorship at the University of Minnesota. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965 for 77 Dream Songs, and he continued to build upon this series of poems, publishing the end result, The Dream Songs, in 1969. His Collected Poems was published after his death in 1991.

From Publishers Weekly:

For readers unattuned to what Thornbury here calls "Berryman's strange and dissonant music," this gathering of verse may unlock the poems' inner recesses. In his extensive introductory essay, the editor, who teaches at St. John's University in Minnesota, explores Berryman's poetry of disrupted syntax, of continual deaths and rebirths, of self-deceptions and ultimate self-understanding. He also provides a biographical context for the sonnets, satires and confessionals, taking into account the poet's peripatetic boyhood, his suppressed rage at his father's suicide, his metamorphoses as Cambridge don, alcoholic philanderer, itinerant professor-poet and suicide at age 57. Berry displayed his febrile inventiveness as early as Sonnets to Chris (1947), a cycle included here that is by turns romantically tender, cynical, manic, elegant and slangy; this edition brings together all of Berryman's published volumes of poetry except for The Dream Songs.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0374126194
• ISBN 13: 9780374126193
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 366
• Editor: Charles Thornbury