John Berryman

’s Life And Career Essay, Research Paper

Joel Athey

BERRYMAN was born John Allyn Smith, Jr., in McAlester, Oklahoma,

the son of John Allyn Smith, a banker, and Martha Little, formerly a schoolteacher. The

family moved frequently, finally settling in Tampa, Florida, where his father speculated

in land, failed, and in 1926 committed suicide. Three months later his mother married John

McAlpin Berryman, whose name was given to the son.

The new family moved to New York City, but hard times followed the 1929 stock market

crash; young John attempted suicide in 1931. The next year he enrolled at Columbia College

(later Columbia University), where he flourished under mentor Mark Van Doren, published

poems in Columbia Review and The Nation (1935), and graduated Phi

Beta Kappa in English. He studied two years at Cambridge University in England, meeting W

B. Yeats, T S. Eliot, W H. Auden, and Dylan Thomas. He tried playwriting, won the Oldham

Shakespeare prize, and published poems in Southern Review (1937).

In 1939 Berryman taught at Wayne University (later Wayne State University) in Detroit

and served as poetry editor of The Nation. By December he was hospitalized for

epilepsy, although he was actually suffering from nervous exhaustion, a condition that

would recur in future years, exacerbated by alcoholism. His first collected poems appeared

in Five Young American Poets (1940), while Berryman taught at Harvard. Classified

4-F for the wartime draft, Berryman married Eileen Mulligan in 1942. The next year he

published Poems. Unemployed and desperate enough to briefly teach English and Latin

at a prep school, Berryman landed an instructorship at Princeton, having been invited by

poet R. P. Blackmur; this became home for a decade.

For the next twenty years Berryman established his academic credentials, beginning with

reviews of W. W. Greg’s The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare, a critical

edition of King Lear (never published), and articles on Henry James, F. Scott

Fitzgerald, and Robert Lowell. He was promoted to associate in creative writing (1946) and

resident fellow (1948) at Princeton, and his work The Dispossessed (1948) won the

Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial award. He associated professionally and

socially with Lowell, Saul Bellow, and others. He was also meeting women, and in 1946 he

began his lifelong series of infidelities, recorded in Sonnets to Chris (written

1947, published 1967; also titled Berryman’s Sonnets). His intense diary entries

provide insight into his mania for sexual attention and adulation.

Berryman’s poetic and academic lives continued apace. He published "The Poetry of

Ezra Pound," defended Pound’s Bollingen Prize in a letter (signed by seventy-three

writers) to The Nation (1949). and published his psychological biography, Stephen

Crane (1950), which reveals Berryman as well as Crane himself (see John Clendenning in

Recovering Berryman, ed. Richard Kelley [1993]). He also wrote on Marlowe,

Shakespeare, Monk Lewis, Walt Whitman, Theodore Dreiser, and Bellow. In 1950 he won the

American Academy award for poetry.

In 1953 Berryman published Homage to Mistress Bradstreet in the Parisan

Review (it appeared in book form in 1956). This difficult poem, a tribute to the

Puritan poet of colonial America, took Berryman five years to complete and demanded much

from the reader when it first appeared with no notes. The Times Literary Supplement hailed

it as a path-breaking masterpiece; poet Robert Fitzgerald called it "the poem of his

generation." In fifty-seven stanzas of eight rhymed lines each, the five sections of Homage

were positioned symmetrically: Berryman’s invocation of the dead poet, a Bradstreet

monologue, a seductive dialogue between the two poets, a second Bradstreet monologue, and

finally Berryman’s peroration. Berryman addressed Bradstreet as both lover and listener,

extending himself through her tribulations as an exile in the Rhode Island colony. He

included personal tragedies such as her heart problems ("wandering pacemaker,")

as well as identified with her situation, where he awaits "in a redskin calm."

Their tension is evidenced even in the pauses:

You must not love me, but I do not bid

you cease

With this work, Berryman emerged as a major literary figure.

During these years, when he won the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award

(1950), the Levinson Prize (1950), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1952), Berryman lectured

at the Universities of Washington and Cincinnati and at the Writer’s Workshop at Iowa, his

teaching described by poet Philip Levine as "brilliant, intense, articulate" (The

Bread of Time [1994]). Berryman’s astounding memory allowed him to quote poetry at

great length, and his short story, "Wash Far Away" (not published until 1975, American

Review), showed how seriously he co

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