John Berryman

Mr. Berryman's posthumous book of poems, Delusions, Etc., had been completed and was in proof before his death on January 7, 1972. The opening section, "Opus Dei," is a sequence of eight poems based on the offices of the day from Lauds to Compline-the lines above being quoted from Nones. Part two consists of five poems whose subject are George Washington ("Rectitude, and the terrible upstanding member"), Beethoven, Emily Dickinson, Georg Trakl, and...

The poems in this posthumous collection were written by John Berryman between 1967 and 1972, the year of his death. The first group consists of forty-five unpublished or uncollected Dream Songs, included the title poem, "Henry's Fate." The second part includes eleven short poems; the third is devoted to unfinished longer poems, one of which is the extraordinary draft version of "Washington in Love," more ambitious in scope and intention than the version...

This volume represents the first appearance in paperback of one of America's most outstanding poets, John Berryman. It contains, besides the long title poem, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, the major portion of Short Poems; a selection from The Dispossessed, which drew on two earlier collections; some poems from His Thought Made Pockets & The Plane Buckt; and one poem from Sonnets.

His Toy, His Dream, His Rest continues and concludes the poem, called The Dream Songs, begun in 77 Dream Songs, which was published in 1964 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. It is a much longer volume than the earlier one and contains 308 songs in all, starting of course with number 78. "Some of the people who addressed themselves to 77 Dream Songs went so desperately astray," writes the author, "that I permit myself one word. The poem then,...

A brilliant and fiercely pitched sonnet cycle about love: at once passionate, forbidden, and doomed John Berryman was an unconventional poet, but he must have surprised even himself when, in his thirties, he found he was suddenly compelled to write sonnets. It was an unusual choice-even an unpopular one-for a poet in a midcentury American literary scene that was less interested in forms. But it was the right choice, for Berryman found himself in a...

Less than a year before his death in 1972, John Berryman signed a contract with his publisher for a book of prose, The Freedom of the Poet, for which he had made a selection from his published and unpublished writings. In his draft of a prefatory note, he acknowledged the influence of Eliot, Blackmur, Pound, and Empson on his critical thought, pointing out that "my interest in critical theory has been slight," and concluding: "But I have also borne...

"A lively sampling from the work of one of the most celebrated and daring poets of the twentieth century John Berryman was perhaps the most idiosyncratic American poet of the twentieth century. Best known for the painfully sad and raucously funny cycle of Dream Songs, he wrote passionately: of love and despair, of grief and laughter, of longing for a better world and coming to terms with this one. The Heart Is Strange, a new selection of his poems,...