A brilliant and fiercely pitched sonnet cycle about love: at once passionate, forbidden, and doomed John Berryman was an unconventional poet, but he must have surprised even himself when, in his thirties, he found he was suddenly compelled to write sonnets. It was an unusual choice―even an unpopular one―for a poet in a midcentury American literary scene that was less interested in forms. But it was the right choice, for Berryman found himself in a situation that called for the sonnet: after several years of a happy marriage, he had fallen helplessly, hopelessly in love with the young wife of a colleague.     "Passion sought; passion requited; passion delayed; and, finally, passion utterly thwarted": this is how the poet April Bernard, in her vivid, intimate introduction, characterizes the sonnet cycle, and it is the cycle that Berryman found himself caught up in. Of course the affair was doomed to end, and end badly. But in the meantime, on the page Berryman performs a spectacular dance of tender, obsessive, impossible love in his "characteristic tonal mixture of bravado and lacerating shame-facedness." Here is the poet as lover, genius, and also, in Bernard's words, as nutcase.     In Berryman's Sonnets, the poet draws on the models of Petrarch and Sidney to reanimate and reimagine the love-sonnet sequence. Complex, passionate, filled with verbal fireworks and the emotional strains of joy, terror, guilt, and longing, these poems are ripe for rediscovery by contemporary readers.

Berryman's Sonnets

BERRYMAN, John

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Essays, lectures, and letters discuss Shakespeare's background, the early dramas, as well as the more mature plays, their texts, and the sonnets

Berryman's Shakespeare

Biographies & Memoirs

Bound in the publisher's original cloth covered boards. Lightly rubbed at the edges and extremities of dust jacket, small closed tears at the head and heel.

Delusions, Etc

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

The Dream Songs is widely seen as Berryman's masterpiece, an impressively vast and varied collection of poems that is in itself a single, sprawling, ever-shifting poem. The songs in this great work are thus offered in many different tones, moods, and guises, although their form, Berryman's idiosyncratic reworking of the sonnet, remains more or less constant. Combining all of Berryman's earlier 77 Dream Songs (which won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (which won the 1969 National Book Award), this one-volume edition contains no fewer than 385 entries in what the critic Denis Donoghue has called Berryman's "dream diary." The book also has an index of first lines, an index of titles, and a note by the author.

The Dream Songs: Poems

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

The late American poet's critical explorations into the works and tempers of his fellows, from Shakespeare to Whitman, from Marlowe to Yeats, Thomas, and Lowell, together with five stories

The Freedom of the Poet

Essays & Correspondence

Brings together poems written by Berryman between 1967 and 1972, the year of his death, including previously unpublished Dream Songs, short verses, and unfinished longer poems

Henry's Fate and Other Poems, 1967-1972

This book continues and concludes the poem, called The Dream Songs, begun in 77 Dream Songs, which was published in 1964 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. It is a much longer volume than the earlier one and contains 308 songs in all, starting of course with number 78. Winner of the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize. 317 pages.

His Toy, His Dream, His Rest

First US edition of John Berryman's richly allusive and moving inquiry into the personal and spiritual life of the Colonial poet, Anne Bradstreet, written in 1948-53 and published in 1956, stylistically marking a major breakthrough for Berryman. Berryman (1914-1972) was an American poet and scholar. He won the Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs in 1965 and the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, a continuation of the Dream Songs, in 1969.

Homage to Mistress Bradstreet: Drawings by Ben Shahn

Berryman

History & Criticism

Bound in the publisher's original cloth covered boards, spine stamped in gilt. Dust jacket is rubbed at the edges, chipped at the extremities.

Love & Fame

A lively sampling from the work of one of the most celebrated and daring poets of the twentieth century
John Berryman was perhaps the most idiosyncratic American poet of the twentieth century. Best known for the painfully sad and raucously funny cycle of Dream Songs, he wrote passionately: of love and despair, of grief and laughter, of longing for a better world and coming to terms with this one. The Heart Is Strange, a new selection of his poems, along with reissues of Berryman's Sonnets, 77 Dream Songs, and the complete Dream Songs, marks the centenary of his birth. The Heart Is Strange includes a generous selection from across Berryman's varied career: from his earliest poems, which show him learning the craft, to his breakthrough masterpiece, "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet," then to his mature verses, which find the poet looking back upon his lovers and youthful passions, and finally, to his late poems, in which he battles with sobriety and an increasingly religious sensibility. The defiant joy and wild genius of Berryman's work has been obscured by his struggles with mental illness and alcohol, his tempestuous relationships with women, and his suicide. This volume, which includes three previously uncollected poems and an insightful introduction by the editor Daniel Swift, celebrates the whole Berryman: tortured poet and teasing father, passionate lover and melancholy scholar. It is a perfect introduction to one of the finest bodies of work yet produced by an American poet.

The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems

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