Selected poems

Synopsis

"Staggering, swaggering, intoxicating": John Berryman achieved a poetry where (in the words of editor Kevin Young) "protagonists search for a lover or friend, ancestor or listener with a recklessness that only Whitman allowed himself. ... Berryman becomes an Everyman attempting, falling short of and often achieving greatness." The formal accomplishments of his early work, epitomized in the masterful Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, led the way to the explosive, splintered, mesmerizing diction of the Dream Songs and the wrenching tones of the late religious poems. By turns or all at once compassionate, raging, scholarly, and uproariously funny, Berryman's poetry remains a unique and monumental presence in the literature of the twentieth century.