John Berryman Summary

Biography EssayJohn Berryman is associated with a group of poets who have become known as the "Middle Generation," a group that includes Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke, and Robert... Read more

John Berryman is associated with a group of poets who have become known as the "Middle Generation," a group that includes Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke, and Robert Lowell. It ... Read more

In the following essay concerned with the relationship between alcohol and the poetic mind, Hyde explicates The Dream Songs of John Berryman "in terms of the disease of alcoholism." I... Read more

Critical Essay by William Pratt As he was transforming himself from an imitative young poet into the inimitable later fantasist of the "Dream Songs," Berryman was developing a comparabl... Read more

Critical Essay by Peter Stitt The popular conception of John Berryman that one most often encounters is that he was a boozehound and skirtchaser who chose to reveal his personal life in verse. This l... Read more

Critical Essay by Edwin Morgan Berryman is a noted example of the poet who is hard to like and equally hard to forget. He drags his reader protesting almost continuously through a landscape of intens... Read more

Critical Essay by Randall Jarrell [John Berryman] is a complicated, nervous, and intelligent writer whose poetry has steadily improved. At first he was possessed by a slavishly Yeats-ish grandiloquen... Read more

Critical Essay by Robert F. Moss Through his spokesman Henry, the central character of the Dream Songs, Berryman articulated his view of literary criticism unequivocally: "—I can'... Read more

Critical Essay by Fleur Adcock [The posthumous collection Henry's Fate] begins with 45 Dream Songs, not necessarily rejected by Berryman but uncollected; they followed on from His Toy, His Dre... Read more

Critical Essay by Clive James If the contention is accepted that an excess of clarity is the only kind of difficulty a work of art should offer, John Berryman's Dream Songs … have been ... Read more

Critical Essay by Arthur Oberg The Dream Songs are distracting and distractions. They are His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, as Berryman indicates in the title of the second volume of poems which, togethe... Read more

Critical Essay by Diane Ackerman In a natural way, John Berryman is oblique, private, elliptical. We seem to overhear him. Locked in a verbal spasm, he has trouble, often enough, in getting out or ac... Read more