Born:
Died:
Education:
Selected Works:
- Berryman's Sonnets (aka Sonnets to Chris)
- Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
- The Dream Songs
- We Dream of Honour
- The Freedom of the Poet
Awards:
- Oldham Shakespeare Prize (1948)
- American Academy Award for Poetry (1950)
- National Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1950)
- Levinson Prize (1950)
- Guggenheim Fellowship (1952)
- Pulitzer Prize (1964)
- Guggenheim Fellowship (1966)
- Fellow of The Academy of American Poets (1966)
- National Endowment for the Arts Award (1967)
- National Book Award (1969)
- Bollingen Award (1969)
Regarding Bipolar Disorder:
His life was punctuated by brilliant creativity and emotional turbulence. He was haunted by the demons of his father’s suicide and a tumultuous relationship with his mother. He chartered a successful career in academia, but always struggled with alcohol abuse, attempted suicides and frequent hospitalizations. Berryman was a man who knew the wild mixture of high mania and low depression - bipolar disorder.
Consider “Dream Song 29,” of which Robert Lowell wrote, “The voice of the man becomes one with the voice of the child here, as their combined rhythm sobs through remorse, wonder, and nightmare. It’s as if two widely separated parts of a man’s life had somehow fused” (Modern American Poetry).
- There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart
so heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry's ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.
And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.
But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.
In 1972, John Berryman ended his life’s struggle by jumping to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
