Poetry by John Berryman including the poems under "Opus Dei" and "Scherzo."

The complete Dream Songs--hypnotic, seductive, masterful--as thrilling to read now as they ever were John Berryman's The Dream Songs are perhaps the funniest, saddest, most intricately wrought cycle of oems by an American in the twentieth century. They are also, more simply, the vibrantly sketched adventures of a uniquely American antihero named Henry. Henry falls in and out of love, and is in and out of the hospital; he sings of joy and desire, and of beings at odds with the world. He is lustful; he is depressed. And while Henry is breaking down and cracking up and patching himself together again, Berryman is doing the same thing to the English language, crafting electric verses that defy grammar but resound with an intuitive truth: "if he had a hundred years," Henry despairs in "Dream Song 29," "& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time / Henry could not make good." This volume collects both 77 Dream Songs, which won Berryman the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, and their continuation, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which was awarded the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize in 1969. The Dream Songs are witty and wild, an account of madness shot through with searing insight, winking word play, and moments of pure, soaring elation. This is a brilliantly sustained and profoundly moving performance that has not yet-and may never be-equaled.

This volume brings together all of John Berryman's poetry, except for his epic The Dream Songs, ranging from his earliest unpublished poem (1934) to those written in the last months of his life (1972). John Berryman: Collected Poems 1937-1971 is a definitive edition of one of America's most distinguished poets.

His Toy, His Dream, His Rest continues and concludes John Berryman's poem called The Dream Songs, begun in 77 Dream Songs, which was published in 1964 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. This longer volume 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, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants therof. Requiescant in pace."

"A new selection of John Berryman's work, in honor of the poet's centenary"--

A Love affair in the poet's youth is depicted in the style of Petrarchism.

The poetry of John Berryman occupies an incomparable place in modern American literature. This study traces the composition of the major poems, and interprets Berryman's characteristic trials and his imaginative triumphs. In Homage to Mistress Bradstreet , which Edmund Wilson called ' the most distinguished long poem by an American since The Waste Land ', Berryman set himself enormous problems of theme and form, and overcame them with the vigorous and exciting craft that is described in this book. He transformed his personal concerns and historical interests into a fully achieved artistic unity, a poem which succeeds both as lyric and as drama. Similarly, in forging the thirteen-year 'epic' of The Dream Songs , 'the tragical history of Henry', as the poet himself called it, Berryman resolutely confronted chosen models such as Don Quixote and The Iliad , and eventually realised his own design and a unique poetic voice. 'I set up the 'Bradstreet' poem as an attack on 'The Waste Land' ' Berryman said in his National Book Award Acceptance Speech; 'I set up ' The Dream Songs ' as hostile to every visible tendency in both American and English poetry...The aim was the same in both poems: the reproduction or invention of the motions of a human personality, free and determined, in one case feminine, in the other masculine.' A chief feature of this study is the remarkably extensive use John Haffenden has made of primary research materials - manuscript drafts, notes, marginalia, diary entries and letters, all of which are printed here for the first time - to illuminate and explain the poems. This book is both a critical analysis of Berryman's mature works and an internal narrative of the poet's struggles and success. It includes comprehensive notes and commentary on 'The Dream Songs' and on 'Delusions, Etc.' , as well as an authoritative discussion and assesment of 'Love & Fame'.

Fifty-nine lyrical works in which the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet describes the creative process, politics, and the struggle of maintaining life.