The Life of John Berryman

John Berryman belonged to the middle generation of American poets. Berryman was a fan of Saul Bellow. Literary success and critical acclaim came late to him. HOMAGE TO MISTRESS BRADSTREET and DREAM SONGS are notable achievements. He knew artistic ecstacy and alcoholic degradation. Berryman was troubled, flamboyant. His father committed suicide when he ws eleven. John Berryman attended Kent School. He was remembered as rather gawky, clumsy. He had an insincere career at school. There was an emphasis on games. Berryman showed immense academic and literary promise. After five years at Kent Berryman went to Columbia. In the initial years extracurricular activities consumed his time and he even failed a course by his life-long mentor and friend, Mark Van Doren. Retaking that course and redeeming himself in other ways, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and went on to Cambridge. At Cambridge his arrogance and set of affectations alienated a number of people. His supervisor was George Rylands. He met Eliot and Auden and Yeats. Studying Yeats, he discovered in that poet the importance of personal symbols. Berryman believed that Yeats united contemplation and action as a complete man. Berryman's beginning as a university teacher took place at Wayne State University. He taught many places and is typically associated with Princeton and the University of Minnesota where he spent the longest periods of his adult life. He was subject to mental breakdowns from over-work, and during the last four years of his life, hospitalization for his condition of alcoholism. Many of his physical ills were psychosomatic. The author describes his friendships with many people including Bhain Campbell and Delmore Schwartz. Berryman in his diaries had a deep and terrible need to stress mostly torment and crisis. He had a painful sense of competition towards other poets. He wrote on Stephen Crane and Ezra Pound and Shakespeare. He was incisive and inventive in the classroom. Among his students even a Berryman style developed. In 1962 Robert Lowell suggested that Berryman publish a provisional volume of Dream Songs. In 1966 a piece showing him to be temperamental and sensational appeared in LIFE. After undergoing treatment at Hazelden, among other places, he wrote a fictional account of his experience in RECOVERY.