author
John Berryman
1919–1988
A major American poet of the mid-20th century, he is best known for the restless, inventive Dream Songs, poems that mix wit, anguish, and startling shifts in voice. His work helped define confessional poetry while still feeling formally daring and hard to pin down.
5 Audiobooks
The Right Time
by John Berryman
The Trouble with Telstar
by John Berryman
Modus Vivendi
by John Berryman
Vigorish
by John Berryman
Card Trick
by John Berryman
About the author
Born in Oklahoma in 1914, John Berryman became one of the most influential American poets of his generation. He studied at Columbia and at Cambridge, and later taught at several universities, including the University of Minnesota. Alongside poetry, he also wrote criticism and a notable biography of Stephen Crane.
His reputation rests especially on Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and 77 Dream Songs, the book that won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In the later Dream Songs, he created the voice of Henry, a strange, comic, wounded persona that let him write about grief, desire, guilt, and spiritual crisis in ways that felt both intimate and theatrical.
Berryman's life was marked by personal turmoil, and readers have long felt the pressure of that struggle in his poems. Even so, his work endures not simply because it is confessional, but because it is so technically alive: musical, jagged, funny, and unpredictable from line to line.