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 The Selected Letters of John Berryman written by John Berryman and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 737 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging, first-of-its-kind selection of Berryman’s correspondence with friends, loved ones, writers, and editors, showcasing the turbulent, fascinating life and mind of one of America’s major poets. The Selected Letters of John Berryman assembles for the first time the poet’s voluminous correspondence. Beginning with a letter to his parents in 1925 and concluding with a letter sent a few weeks before his death in 1972, Berryman tells his story in his own words. Included are more than 600 letters to almost 200 people—editors, family members, students, colleagues, and friends. The exchanges reveal the scope of Berryman’s ambitions, as well as the challenges of practicing his art within the confines of the publishing industry and contemporary critical expectations. Correspondence with Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Adrienne Rich, Saul Bellow, and other writers demonstrates Berryman’s sustained involvement in the development of literary culture in the postwar United States. We also see Berryman responding in detail to the work of writers such as Carolyn Kizer and William Meredith and encouraging the next generation—Edward Hoagland, Valerie Trueblood, and others. The letters show Berryman to be an energetic and generous interlocutor, but they also make plain his struggles with personal and familial trauma, at every stage of his career. An introduction by editors Philip Coleman and Calista McRae explains the careful selection of letters and contextualizes the materials within Berryman’s career. Reinforcing the critical and creative interconnectedness of Berryman’s work and personal life, The Selected Letters confirms his place as one of the most original voices of his generation and opens new horizons for appreciating and interpreting his poems.
Download or read book For the Union Dead written by Robert Lowell and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Midcentury Quartet written by Thomas J. Travisano and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1999-12-29 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a February 1966 letter to her artistic confidant, RobertLowell, Elizabeth Bishop tellingly grouped four midcentury poets: Lowell, RandallJarrell, John Berryman, and herself. For Bishop--always wary of being pigeonholedand therefore reticent about naming her favorite contemporaries--it was a rareexplicit acknowledgment of an informal but enduring artistic circle that has evadedthe notice of literary journalists for more than forty years. Despite the privatenature of their dialogue, the group's members--Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, andBerryman--left a compelling record of their mutual interchange and influence.Drawing on an extensive range of published and archival sources, Thomas Travisanotraces these poets' creation of a surprisingly coherent postmodern aesthetic anddefines its continuing influence on Americanpoetry. The refusal of this "midcentury quartet,"as Travisano calls them, to voice a formalized doctrine, coupled with theirintuitive way of working, has caused critics to miss the coherence of their project.Travisano argues that these poets are not only successors to Pound, Auden, Stevens, and Eliot but postmodern explorers in their own right. In forging their ownaesthetic, characterized here as a postmodern mode of elegy, they encounteredsignificant resistance from their immediate modernist mentors Allen Tate, John CroweRansom, and Marianne Moore. Jarrell, whom othersof the group regarded as a critic of particular genius, was first described as apost-modernist in a 1941 review by Ransom that Travisano cites as the earliest knownuse of the term. In Jarrell's review of Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle six yearslater, he named Lowell a postmodernist and identified traits, among them the use ofpastiche, that are now considered by theorists such as Fredric Jameson asspecifically postmodern. And Bishop's inventiveness allowed her to adapt aself-exploratory mode often, but imprecisely, termed confessional to challengingforms such as the double sonnet, villanelle, andsestina. Each of these poets suffered adevastating loss during childhood and lived through the twentieth-century disastersof the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust, and the cold war. Thecontinual tension in their poetry between subjectivity and form, claims Travisano, reflects the plight of the fractured individual in a postmodern world. By arguing sosharply for the importance of this circle, Midcentury Quartet is certain to redrawthe map of postwar American poetry.
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 Lord Weary s Castle written by Robert Lowell and published by . This book was released on 1951 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book John Berryman Collected Poems written by John Berryman and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2014-10-21 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together all of John Berryman's poetry, except for his epic The Dream Songs, ranging from his earliest unpublished poem (1934) to those written in the last months of his life (1972). John Berryman: Collected Poems 1937-1971 is a definitive edition of one of America's most distinguished poets.
Download or read book Memoirs written by Robert Lowell and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2022-08-02 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A complete collection of Robert Lowell’s autobiographical prose, from unpublished writings about his youth to reflections on the triumphs and confusions of his adult life. Robert Lowell's Memoirs is an unprecedented literary discovery: the manuscript of Lowell’s lyrical evocation of his childhood, which was written in the 1950s and has remained unpublished until now. Meticulously edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc, it serves as a precursor or companion to his groundbreaking book of poems Life Studies, which signaled a radically new prose-inflected direction in his work, and indeed in American poetry. Memoirs also includes intense depictions of Lowell’s mental illness and his determined efforts to recover. It concludes with Lowell’s reminiscences of other writers, among them T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Hannah Arendt, and Sylvia Plath. Memoirs demonstrates Lowell’s expansive gifts as a prose stylist and his powers of introspection and observation. It provides striking new evidence of the range and brilliance of Lowell’s achievement. Includes black-and-white photographs
Download or read book For Lizzie and Harriet written by Robert Lowell and published by London : Faber. This book was released on 1973-01 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poems.
Download or read book Robert Lowell Setting the River on Fire written by Kay Redfield Jamison and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • In this magisterial study of the relationship between illness and art, the best-selling author of An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison, brings an entirely fresh understanding to the work and life of Robert Lowell (1917-1977), whose intense, complex, and personal verse left a lasting mark on the English language and changed the public discourse about private matters. In his poetry, Lowell put his manic-depressive illness (now known as bipolar disorder) into the public domain, and in the process created a new and arresting language for madness. Here Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison brings her expertise in mood disorders to bear on Lowell’s story, illuminating not only the relationships between mania, depression, and creativity but also how Lowell’s illness and treatment influenced his work (and often became its subject). A bold, sympathetic account of a poet who was—both despite and because of mental illness—a passionate, original observer of the human condition.
Download or read book The Life of John Berryman written by John Haffenden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1983 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Life Studies and For the Union Dead written by Robert Lowell and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-10-16 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Lowell, with Elizabeth Bishop, stands apart as the greatest American poet of the latter half of the twentieth century—and Life Studies and For the Union Dead stand as among his most important volumes. In Life Studies, which was first published in 1959, Lowell moved away from the formality of his earlier poems and started writing in a more confessional vein. The title poem of For the Union Dead concerns the death of the Civil War hero (and Lowell ancestor) Robert Gould Shaw, but it also largely centers on the contrast between Boston's idealistic past and its debased present at the time of its writing, in the early 1960's. Throughout, Lowell addresses contemporaneous subjects in a voice and style that themselves push beyond the accepted forms and constraints of the time.
Download or read book After thirty Falls written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prefaced by an account of the early days of Berryman studies by bibliographer and scholar Richard J. Kelly, “After thirty Falls” is the first collection of essays to be published on the American poet John Berryman (1914-1972) in over a decade. The book seeks to provoke new interest in this important figure with a group of original essays and appraisals by scholars from Ireland, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and the United States. Exploring such areas as the poet’s engagements with Shakespeare and the American sonnet tradition, his use of the Trickster figure and the idea of performance in his poetics, it expands the interpretive framework by which Berryman may be evaluated and studied, and it will be of interest to students of modern American poetry at all levels. What makes the collection particularly valuable is its inclusion of previously unpublished material – including a translation of a poem by Catullus and excerpts from the poet’s detailed notes on the life of Christ – thereby providing new contexts for future assessments of Berryman’s contribution to the development of poetry, poetics, and the relationship between scholarship and other forms of writing in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Berryman and Lowell written by Stephen Matterson and published by Springer. This book was released on 1988-06-18 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PMContents: Introduction: Tumbles and Leaps; Beginning in Wisdom; Towards a Rhetoric of Destitution; Excellence and Loss; History and Seduction; Defeats and Dreams; Notes and References; Index
Download or read book Robert Lowell written by Ian Hamilton and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2011-09-15 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in 1917 into an aristocratic Boston family Robert Lowell was not yet thirty when his first major collection of poems, Lord Weary's Castle, won the Pulitzer Prize. With Life Studies, his third book, he found the intense, highly personal voice that made him the foremost American poet of his generation. He held strong, complex and very public political views. His private life was turbulent, marred by manic depression and troubled marriages. But in this superb biography (first published in 1982) the poet Ian Hamilton illuminates both the life and the work of Lowell with sympathetic understanding and consummate narrative skill. 'Our one consolation for Ian Hamilton's early death is that his work seems to have lived on with undiminished force... The critical prose, in particular, still sets a standard that nobody else comes near.' Clive James
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 A Community of Writers written by Robert Dana and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 1999-04-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With these words, written long before his Iowa Writers' Workshop became world famous, much imitated, and academically rich, Paul Engle captured the spirit behind his beloved workshop. Now, in this collection of essays by and about those writers who shared the energetic early years, Robert Dana presents a dynamic, informative tribute to Engle and his world. The book's three sections mingle myth and history with style and grace and no small amount of humor. The beginning essays are given over to memories of Paul Engle in his heyday. The second group focuses particularly on those teachers—Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Kurt Vonnegut, for example—who made the workshop hum on a day-to-day basis. Finally, the third section is devoted to storytelling: tall tales, vignettes, surprises, sober and not-so-sober moments. Engle's own essay, "The Writer and the Place," describes his "simple, and yet how reckless" conviction that "the creative imagination in all of the arts is as important, as congenial, and as necessary, as the historical study of all the arts." Today, of course, there are hundreds of writers' workshops, many of them founded and directed by graduates of the original Iowa workshop. But when Paul Engle arrived in Iowa there were exactly two. His indomitable nature and great persuasive powers, combined with his distinguished reputation as a poet, loomed large behind the enhancement of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. This volume of fine and witty essays reveals the enthusiasm and drive and sheer pleasure that went into Iowa's renowned workshop.
