John Berryman

John Berryman (born October 25, 1914, McAlester, Oklahoma, U.S.—died January 7, 1972, Minneapolis, Minnesota) was an American poet whose many important works of poetry include the long poem Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956). Although he rejected the categorization, he is considered to be one of the major voices of the confessional poetry movement that emerged in the mid-20th century.

Education and teaching career

Berryman was brought up a strict Roman Catholic in the small Oklahoma town of Anadarko, moving at 10 with his family to Tampa, Florida. When he was 12, his father killed himself. Berryman attended a private school in Connecticut and graduated from Columbia University, where he was influenced by his teacher, the poet Mark Van Doren. After study in England at the University of Cambridge in 1938, he returned to the United States to teach at Wayne State University in Detroit, beginning a career that included posts at Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Minnesota.

Early poems

Berryman began to publish in little magazines during the late 1930s, and in 1940 Five Young American Poets contained 20 of his poems. Two other volumes of poetry—Poems (1942) and The Dispossessed (1948)—followed. A richly erotic autobiographical sequence about a love affair, Berryman’s Sonnets, appeared in 1967. Berryman was a versatile man of letters: “The Lovers” appeared in The Best American Short Stories of 1946, and his story “The Imaginary Jew” (1945) is often anthologized. His biography of 19th-century American novelist and poet Stephen Crane was published in 1950.

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Poetry: First Lines

Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and 77 Dream Songs

Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet is a monologue that pays tribute to Anne Bradstreet, the first woman to write English verse in the American colonies. Sometimes her voice is heard in the poem, sometimes Berryman’s, and throughout a loving and intimate grasp of the details of American history is manifest.

His new technical daring was also evident in 77 Dream Songs (1964), augmented to form a sequence of 385 “Dream Songs” by His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968). Berryman’s work bears some relation to the confessional school of poetry that flourished among many of his contemporaries, but in his case bursts of humor sporadically light up the troubled interior landscape. This autobiographical note continued to be sounded in Love & Fame (1970), in which he conveys much in a deceptively offhand manner.

Death and posthumous publications

Berryman died by suicide by jumping from a bridge onto the ice of the Mississippi River. Recovery, an account of his struggle against alcoholism, was published posthumously in 1973. Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, which includes previously unpublished poems from the “Dream Songs” series, appeared in 2025.