77 Dream Songs

Download or read book The Dream Songs written by John Berryman and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-10-21 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The complete Dream Songs--hypnotic, seductive, masterful--as thrilling to read now as they ever were John Berryman's The Dream Songs are perhaps the funniest, saddest, most intricately wrought cycle of oems by an American in the twentieth century. They are also, more simply, the vibrantly sketched adventures of a uniquely American antihero named Henry. Henry falls in and out of love, and is in and out of the hospital; he sings of joy and desire, and of beings at odds with the world. He is lustful; he is depressed. And while Henry is breaking down and cracking up and patching himself together again, Berryman is doing the same thing to the English language, crafting electric verses that defy grammar but resound with an intuitive truth: "if he had a hundred years," Henry despairs in "Dream Song 29," "& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time / Henry could not make good." This volume collects both 77 Dream Songs, which won Berryman the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, and their continuation, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which was awarded the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize in 1969. The Dream Songs are witty and wild, an account of madness shot through with searing insight, winking word play, and moments of pure, soaring elation. This is a brilliantly sustained and profoundly moving performance that has not yet-and may never be-equaled.

Download or read book His Toy, His Dream, His Rest written by John Berryman and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-10-21 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: His Toy, His Dream, His Rest continues and concludes John Berryman's poem called The Dream Songs, begun in 77 Dream Songs, which was published in 1964 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. This longer volume contains 308 songs in all, starting, of course, with number 78. "Some of the people who addressed themselves to 77 Dream Songs went so desperately astray," writes the author, "that I permit myself one word. The poem then, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants therof. Requiescant in pace."

Download or read book Poems written by John Berryman and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets in our literature. John Berryman (1914-72) was a poet from an immensely gifted generation of American poets that included Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and Elizabeth Bishop. His long sequence The Dream Songs has become an enduring landmark in American poetry and a tribute to Berryman's own endurance in the face of alcoholism, depression and mental instability. In 1972 he leaped to his death from a bridge above the Mississippi River.

Download or read book John Berryman written by John Berryman and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1989-09-19 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of Berryman's poems, written between 1937 and 1971, includes his seven collections of short poems, the original text of his sonnets, and Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, one of his two long poems.

Download or read book Delusions, Etc. of John Berryman written by John Berryman and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1972 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry by John Berryman including the poems under "Opus Dei" and "Scherzo."

Download or read book Love & Fame written by John Berryman and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1970 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty-nine lyrical works in which the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet describes the creative process, politics, and the struggle of maintaining life.

Download or read book Homage to Mistress Bradstreet written by John Berryman and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-10-21 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume represents the first appearance in paperback of one of America's most outstanding poets, John Berryman. It contains, besides the long title poem, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, the major portion of Short Poems; a selection from The Dispossessed, which drew on two earlier collections; some poems from His Thought Made Pockets & The Plane Buckt; and one poem from Sonnets. "It seems to me the most distinguished long poem by an American since The Waste Land." - Edmund Wilson