Awards

John Berryman  won eleven awards:
1. Oldham Shakespeare Prize
2. American Academy award for poetry (1950)
3. National Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1950)
4. The Levinson Prize (1950)
5. The Guggenheim Fellowship (1952, 1966)
6. Academy of American Poets
7. The Pulitzer Prize(1964)
8. National Endowment for the Arts award (1967)
9. National Book Award (1969)
10.The Bollingen Award (1969)
11. Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial award (1948)

The Traveller

They pointed me out on the highway, and they said
'That man has a curious way of holding his head.'

They pointed me out on the beach; they said 'That man
Will never become as we are, try as he can.'

They pointed me out at the station, and the guard
Looked at me twice, thrice, thoughtfully & hard.

I took the same train that the others took,
To the same place. Were it not for that look
And those words, we were all of us the same.
I studied merely maps. I tried to name
The effects of motion on the traveller's,
I watched the couple I could see, the curse
And blessings of that couple, their destination,
The deception practiced on them at the station,
Their courage. When the train stopped and they knew
The end of their journey, I descended too.

Dream Song 1: Huffy Henry Hid the day

Huffy Henry hid the day,

unappeasable Henry sulked.

I see his point,-a trying to put things over.

It was the thought that they thought

they could do it made Henry wicked & away.

But he should have come out and talked.

All the world like a woolen lover

once did seem on Henry’s side.

Then came a departure.

Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.

I don’t see how Henry, pried

open for all the world to see, survived.

What he has now to say is a long

wonder the world can bear & be.

Once in a sycamore I was glad

all at the top, and I sang.

Hard on the land wears the strong sea

The Ball Poem

What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,
What, what is he to do? I saw it go
Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then
Merrily over—there it is in the water!
No use to say 'O there are other balls':
An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy
As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down
All his young days into the harbour where
His ball went. I would not intrude on him,
A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now
He senses first responsibility
In a world of possessions. People will take balls,
Balls will be lost always, little boy,
And no one buys a ball back. Money is external.
He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,
The epistemology of loss, how to stand up
Knowing what every man must one day know
And most know many days, how to stand up
And gradually light returns to the street
A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight,
Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
Floor of the harbour . . I am everywhere,
I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move
With all that move me, under the water
Or whistling, I am not a little boy.

The Biography

           John Berryman was born on 7 January 1914. He was an American poet, born in McAlester Oklahoma. He was a major figure in american poetry in the second half of the 20th century and often considered one of the founders of the Confessional school of poetry. He is one of the figures acting as a bridge between the formally loose socially aware poetry of the beats and the personal, grieving poetry o 'The Dream Songs', which are both playful, witty and morbid. Berryman died by suicide in 1972. Although Berryman published poems and achieved recognition early, his first major work was Homage to Mistress Bradstreet in 1956. However it was the collection of Dream Songs that gathered him the most admiration. The first volume, entitled 77 Dream Songs was published in 1964 and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The second volume of Dream Songs, entitled 'His Toy, His Dream, His Rest' appeared in 1968. The two volumes of Dream Songs were published together as The Dream Songs in 1969. In 1924, when the poet was ten, his father John Smith, a banker in Florida, shot himself. He was the first person to discover the body. The vision of his father's suicide haunted John Berryman's poetic imagination and the subject is addressed indirectly in the Dream Songs several times and directly once, where the poet wishes that he could kill the corpse of his father. Berryman was an alcoholic and friends reported that even as a student at Columbia University he was two different people when drinking and sober. As a mature poet, Berryman's alcoholism and depression interfered with his ability to give readings, to speak in public and to work appropriately. In 1972, Berryman's depression led him to follow the example of his father and to kill himself by jumping from a bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota.