Dream Song 1 | Academy of American Poets

Dream Song 1 | Academy of American Poets
About this poet
John Berryman was born John Smith in McAlester, Oklahoma, on October 25, 1914. He received an
undergraduate degree from Columbia College in 1936 and attended Cambridge University on a
fellowship. He taught at Wayne State University in Detroit and went on to occupy posts at Harvard
and Princeton. From 1955 until his death in 1972, he was a professor at the University of
Minnesota.His early work was published in a volume entitled Five Young American Poets in 1940
and reflects the influences of the Irish and British poets W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, Gerard Manley
Hopkins, and the Americans Hart Crane and Ezra Pound. Tremendously erudite and a brilliant
teacher, Berryman in his early work— Poems (New Directions, 1942) and free download songs of
gunday in mp3 The Dispossessed (W. Sloane Associates, 1948)— displayed great technical control in
poems that remained firmly rooted in the conventions of the time.It was not until the publication of
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (Noonday Press) in 1956, when he was already in his forties, that he
won widespread recognition and acclaim as a boldly original and innovative poet. Nevertheless, no
one was prepared for the innovation that would follow, a collection that would seal Berryman's
reputation as an essential American original: 77 Dream Songs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which
was published in 1964 and awarded a Pulitzer Prize, unveiled the unforgettable and irreppressible
alter egos "Henry" and "Mr. Bones" in a sequence of sonnet-like poems whose wrenched syntax,
scrambled diction, extraordinary leaps of language and tone, and wild mixture of high lyricism and
low comedy plumbed the extreme reaches of a human soul and psyche. In succeeding years
Berryman added to the sequence, until there were nearly four hundred collected as The Dream
Songs (Farrar, Straus download mp3 music free malaysia road maps and Giroux, 1969).But the
psyche that had been plumbed could not bear the strain; Berryman, who never recovered from the
childhood shock of his father's suicide, was prone to emotional instability and heavy drinking
throughout his life. Tragically, on January 7, 1972, he died by jumping off a bridge in
Minneapolis.John Berryman was elected a Fellow of the Academy of American Poets in 1966 and
served as a Chancellor from 1968 until his death.Selected BibliographyPoetryCollected Poems 1937-
1971 (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989)Henry's Fate and Other Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1977)Delusions, Etc. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972)Selected Poems, 1938-1968 (Faber and
Faber, 1972)Love & Fame (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970)The Dream Songs (Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1969)His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968)Homage to Mistress
Bradstreet and Other Poems (Noonday Press, 1968)Berryman's Sonnets (Farrar Straus & Giroux,
1967)Short Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967)77 Dream Songs (Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1964)His Thoughts Made Pockets & the Plane Buckt (C. Fredericks, 1958)Homage to Mistress
Bradstreet ( Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1956)The Dispossessed (W. Sloane Associates, 1948)Poems
(New Directions, 1942)ProseThe Freedom of the Poet (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976)Recovery
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973)The Arts of Reading (1960)Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography
(Sloane, 1950) Multimedia Â