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John Allyn Berryman (October 25, 1914 – January 7, 1972) was an American poet and scholar, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and was considered a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry, though when he was asked about being a confessional poet, he replied "with rage and contempt". His best-known work is ''The Dream Songs''. ==Life and career== John Berryman was born John Allyn Smith, Jr. in Oklahoma where he was raised until the age of ten, when his father, John Smith, a banker, and his mother, Martha (also known as Peggy), a schoolteacher, moved to Tampa, Florida. In 1926, in Florida, when the poet was eleven years old, his father apparently shot and killed himself, though there were conjectures that his mother and future stepfather killed him. Berryman was haunted by his father's death for the rest of his life and would later write about his struggle to come to terms with it in his book ''The Dream Songs''. In "Dream Song #143", he wrote, "That mad drive (commit suicide ) wiped out my childhood. I put him down/while all the same on forty years I love him/stashed in Oklahoma/besides his brother Will". In "Dream Song #145", he also wrote the following lines about his father:
Similarly, in Dream Song #384, Berryman wrote:
After his father's death at the rear entrance to Kipling Arms, where the Smiths rented an apartment, the poet's mother, within months, married John Angus McAlpin Berryman in New York City.〔(Nicorvo, Jay Baron. "The Art of Reading John Berryman." ) ''Poets & Writers''. 30 January 2015.〕 The poet was renamed John Allyn McAlpin Berryman. Berryman's mother also changed her first name from Peggy to Jill.〔Mariani, Paul. ''Dream Songs: The Life of John Berryman''. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990.〕 Although his stepfather would later divorce his mother, Berryman and his stepfather stayed on good terms.〔Ellman, Richard and Robert O'Clair. ''The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry''. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1973.〕 With both his mother and stepfather working, his mother decided to send him away to the South Kent School, a private boarding school in Connecticut.〔 Then Berryman went on to college at Columbia College where he studied under the literary scholar and poet Mark Van Doren.〔 Berryman would later credit Van Doren with sparking his interest in writing poetry seriously. For two years, Berryman also studied overseas at Clare College, Cambridge, on a Kellett Fellowship, awarded by Columbia.〔 He graduated in 1936. Regarding Berryman's earliest success in poetry, the ''Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry'' editors note that "Berryman's early work formed part of a volume entitled ''Five Young American Poets'', published by New Directions in 1940".〔 One of the other young poets included in the book was Randall Jarrell. Berryman would soon publish some of this early verse in his first book, also with New Directions Publishing, simply titled ''Poems'', in 1942. However, his first mature collection of poems, ''The Dispossessed'', appeared six years later, published by William Sloane Associates. The book received largely negative reviews from poets like Randall Jarrell who wrote, in ''The Nation'', that Berryman was "a complicated, nervous, and intelligent ()" whose poetry in ''The Dispossessed'' was too derivative of W. B. Yeats.〔 Berryman would later concur with this assessment of his early work, stating, "I didn't want to be ''like'' Yeats; I wanted to ''be'' Yeats."〔Bloom, James (1984) ''The stock of available reality: R.P. Blackmur and John Berryman'' Bucknell University Press p61 ISBN 0-8387-5066-4〕 In 1947, Berryman started an affair with a married woman named Chris while he was still married to his first wife, Eileen. He documented the affair with a long sonnet sequence that he refrained from publishing, in part, because publication of the sonnets would have revealed the affair to his wife. However, he did eventually decide to publish the work, titled ''Berryman's Sonnets'', in 1967, having long since divorced his first wife. The work included over one hundred sonnets.〔 In 1950, Berryman published a biography of the fiction writer and poet Stephen Crane whom he greatly admired. This book was followed by his next significant poem, ''Homage to Mistress Bradstreet'' (1956), which featured illustrations by the artist Ben Shahn and was Berryman's first poem to receive "national attention" and a positive response from critics.〔(Poetry Foundation profile )〕 Edmund Wilson wrote that it was "the most distinguished long poem by an American since T. S. Eliot's ''The Waste Land''." When "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and Other Poems was published in 1959, the poet Conrad Aiken praised the shorter poems in the book which he thought were actually better than "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet".〔Berryman, John. ''Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and other poems.'' New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1959.〕 Despite the relative success of his third book of verse, Berryman's great poetic breakthrough occurred after he published ''77 Dream Songs'' in 1964. It won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and solidified Berryman's standing as one of the most important poets of the post-World War II generation that included Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Delmore Schwartz. Soon afterwards, Berryman started receiving a great deal of national attention from the press, from arts organizations, and even from the White House which sent him an invitation to dine with President Lyndon B. Johnson (though Berryman had to decline because he was in Ireland at the time).〔 Berryman was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967,〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMembers/ChapterB.pdf )〕 and that same year ''Life'' magazine ran a feature story on him. Also, that year the newly created National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a ten thousand dollar grant (though he admitted, when asked about the award by a Minneapolis reporter, that he had never heard of the organization before).〔 Berryman also continued to work on the "dream song" poems at a feverish pace and published a second, significantly longer, volume entitled ''His Toy, His Dream, His Rest'', in 1968, which won the National Book Award for Poetry and the Bollingen Prize.〔 ("National Book Awards – 1969" ). National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-02-25. (With acceptance speech by Berryman and essay by Kiki Petrosino from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)〕 The following year Berryman republished ''77 Dreams Songs'' and ''His Toy, His Dream, His Rest'' as one book titled ''The Dream Songs'', in which the character Henry serves as Berryman's alter ego. But in ''Love & Fame'' (1970), he dropped the mask of Henry to write more plainly about his life. Responses to the poems from critics and most of Berryman's peers ranged from tepid, at best, to hostile; now the collection is generally "considered a minor work".〔Galassi, Jonathan. "John Berryman: Sorrows and Passions of His Majesty the Ego." Poetry Nation, No. 2, 1974. 117-124. ()〕 The character of Henry reappeared in a couple of poems published in ''Delusions Etc.,'' (1972), Berryman's last collection, which focused on his religious concerns and his own spiritual rebirth. The book was published posthumously and, like its predecessor, ''Love & Fame'', it is considered a minor work.〔 Berryman taught or lectured at a number of universities including University of Iowa (in their Writer's Workshop), Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Cincinnati, and the University of Minnesota, where he spent the majority of his career, except for his sabbatical year in 1962-3, when he taught at Brown University. Some of his illustrious students included W. D. Snodgrass, William Dickey, Donald Justice, Philip Levine, Robert Dana, Jane Cooper, Donald Finkel, and Henri Coulette. Philip Levine stated, in a recorded interview from 2009, that Berryman took his class extremely seriously and that "he was entrancing ... magnetic and inspiring and very hard on (students' ) work ... () he was () the best teacher that I ever had". Berryman was fired from the University of Iowa after a fight with his landlord led to him being arrested, jailed overnight, and fined for disorderly conduct and public intoxication.〔 He turned to his friend, the poet Allen Tate, who helped him get his teaching job at the University of Minnesota.〔Healy, Steve (September 9, 1998). ("John Berryman: The Dreamer Awakes." ) ''City Pages''.〕 Berryman was married three times. And according to the editors of ''The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry'', he lived turbulently.〔 During one of the many times he was hospitalized in order to detox from alcohol abuse, in 1970, he experienced what he termed "a sort of religious conversion". According to his biographer Paul Mariani, Berryman experienced "a sudden and radical shift from a belief in a transcendent God ... to a belief in a God who cared for the individual fates of human beings and who even interceded for them."〔 Nevertheless, Berryman continued to abuse alcohol and to struggle with depression, as he had throughout much of his adult life, and on the morning of January 7, 1972, he killed himself by jumping from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, onto the west bank of the Mississippi River.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「John Berryman」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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