A short life of the author
John Allyn McAlpin Berryman (1914–1972), born John Allyn Smith Jr. on 25 October 1914 in McAlester, Oklahoma, was shaped by a catastrophe: his father, John Allyn Smith, shot himself outside the family’s apartment in Tampa, Florida, in 1926, when John was eleven. The boy was standing nearby. He took the surname of his mother’s second husband, John Angus McAlpin Berryman, and spent the rest of his life in the shadow of his father’s suicide — a wound that runs through every major poem he wrote and that he finally repeated when he jumped from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis on 7 January 1972.
Life and Career
Berryman attended South Kent School in Connecticut and Columbia University, where he studied under Mark Van Doren, and Clare College, Cambridge, on a fellowship. He taught at Wayne State, Harvard, Princeton, and — for the last decade of his life — the University of Minnesota, where he was a brilliant, chaotic, increasingly alcoholic presence in the English department.
His early work — The Dispossessed (1948) — is accomplished but conventional. Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956) was his first major achievement: a 57-stanza poem in which Berryman speaks across three centuries to Anne Bradstreet, the first significant American poet, creating a dramatic dialogue between the seventeenth century and the twentieth. Edmund Wilson called it “the most distinguished long poem by an American since The Waste Land.”
77 Dream Songs (1964) won the Pulitzer Prize and introduced Henry — Berryman’s alter ego, a middle-aged white American intellectual who sometimes speaks in blackface dialect (through a minstrel-show interlocutor called “Mr. Bones”), drinks, lusts, grieves, teaches, and wrestles with the question of survival. The Dream Songs are written in an idiosyncratic 18-line stanza form, in a language that mixes high diction with slang, baby talk, and invented syntax. The complete sequence — His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968, National Book Award) — runs to 385 poems and constitutes the most sustained achievement in American confessional poetry.
Love & Fame (1970) and Delusions, Etc. (1972, posthumous) marked a turn toward religious poetry — Berryman, an alcoholic who had been through multiple treatment programmes, found a desperate, unstable faith in his last years.
Major Works and Themes
The Dream Songs are Berryman’s monument. Henry is one of the great literary characters — not a persona in the usual sense but a figure who absorbs every aspect of Berryman’s experience (his alcoholism, his sexual obsessions, his grief for dead friends, his ambition, his self-hatred) and transforms it into a music of extraordinary range. The sequence includes elegies for Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, and Sylvia Plath; erotic poems of surprising frankness; comic poems of academic life; and meditations on fame, failure, and death.
The recurring question of the Dream Songs is whether it is possible to survive — psychologically, spiritually, literally — in a world of such overwhelming loss. Berryman’s answer, delivered in the final poem, is equivocal.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Berryman is now regarded as one of the essential American poets of the mid-century, alongside Lowell, Plath, and Bishop. The Dream Songs, initially controversial (the blackface element was criticised even in the 1960s), are increasingly recognised as a work of permanent importance — the most ambitious attempt by an American poet to create a character as complex and contradictory as a great novelistic protagonist.
Key Works
- Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956)
- 77 Dream Songs (1964) — Pulitzer Prize
- His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968) — National Book Award
- Love & Fame (1970)
- Recovery (1973, posthumous novel)
Collecting Berryman
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy) is the key title. First editions in jacket bring $300–$800.
77 Dream Songs (1964, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) — the Pulitzer winner — brings $200–$600.
His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968, FSG) brings $100–$300.
Signed copies are scarce. Berryman signed at university readings but was not a systematic signer. His death at fifty-seven closed the supply early. Authenticated signed copies of any title command significant premiums in the poetry collecting market.