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.