John Berryman

UXL Newsmakers, (2005)

John Berryman

The life of John Berryman (1914-1972) is at the center of his poetry. Dealing with obsession, tragedy, desire, ironic comedy, and the deep pain of life itself, Berryman's poetry is both brilliant and tormented. With The Dream Songs, which took him 13 years to complete, Berryman claimed his place as one of the most innovative and important American poets of the twentieth century.

John Berryman was born John Allyn Smith, Jr., in McAlester, Oklahoma, on October 25, 1914, the first child of John Allyn Smith and Martha Little Smith. Berryman's father had left his childhood home in Minnesota to relocate to Oklahoma, where he met and married Little, a schoolteacher. After ten years working as a banker in Oklahoma,

Smith moved his family, which by then included a second son, Robert Jefferson (born 1917), to Florida in order to benefit from an economic boom occurring at that time. Unfortunately, by the mid-1920s the boom was over, and Smith's business ventures in land speculation failed.

With his business career in shambles, Smith became depressed and withdrawn. His relationship with his wife, never a storybook romance, became even more unstable, and his wife began a relationship with John Berryman, the Smith's landlord. Depressed and intoxicated, Smith committed suicide by gunshot on June 26, 1926. Three months later, his widow married Berryman. Young John was soon officially adopted by Berryman, and he took his new step-father's name. The events surrounding his father's death, which occurred when Berryman was twelve, profoundly affected his life and his poetry.

The family moved to New York in late 1926, and in 1928 Berryman enrolled in South Kent School in Connecticut, a boarding school known for its competitive athletic programs rather than its academic excellence. Berryman, who had little ability and no interest in sports, did not fit in well at the school. His lack of coordination, along with a severe case of acne, made him an easy target for bullies. On March 7, 1931, he attempted suicide. Despite these troubles, Berryman excelled academically at South Kent, and became the first boy in the school's history to graduate early, not needing to complete his last term.

In 1932, Berryman entered Columbia College (later Columbia University) where he came under the influence of poet and scholar Mark Van Doren, who became both a father figure and a mentor. Berryman was a diligent student and began taking poetry very seriously; he had several poems and reviews published in the Columbia Review and The Nation. Upon graduating from Columbia College with a degree in English, Berryman earned the honor of being named a Kellett Fellow, which allowed him to study at Clare College, in Cambridge, England, for two years. During this time, he met such writers at W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Dylan Thomas. During his second year, Berryman won the Oldham Shakespeare Scholarship, a prestigious award, and published several poems in the Southern Review.

Early Poems

In 1939, Berryman found himself back in New York, working as a part-time poetry editor for The Nation and an instructor in English at Wayne University in Detroit (now Wayne State University). In December 1939, Berryman was hospitalized for exhaustion and symptoms diagnosed as epilepsy. Throughout his life, he would continue to battle for emotional and mental peace, a battle made more difficult by his increasing reliance on alcohol. In 1940, he accepted a teaching position at Harvard University, and his first poems were published, along with works by Mary Barnard, Randall Jarrell, W. R. Moses, and George Marion O'Donnell in the collection, Five Young American Poets. Berryman published these same poems separately in 1942. He received recognition for the technical preciseness of his verse, and some critics praised his impersonal style. Other reviewers felt that Berryman was too structured, that he cared too much about form and not enough about content, and that he lacked emotion, depth, and substance in his writing.

Princeton Years

On October 24, 1942, while at Harvard, Berryman married Eileen Patricia Mulligan. The next year Berryman left Harvard but failed to immediately secure another desirable position. For part of 1943, he taught Latin and English at a prep school. However, before the year ended, Berryman was invited by poet Richard Blackmur to join the faculty at Princeton University as an instructor in English. He spent the next ten years at Princeton.

After teaching for a year, Berryman spent two and a half years in an independent study of Shakespearean textual criticism. He was appointed to teach again in 1946. Berryman's circle of friends widened considerably during his time at Princeton, and he taught such writers as W. S. Merwin, Frederick Buechner, and William Arrowsmith. In the classroom, he quickly became famous for his charismatic teaching style. By the mid-1940s, he had also earned a reputation for his heavy drinking, womanizing, and unpredictable temperament that could shift from endearing to intimidating. It was clear to his close friends and students that his eccentric behavior was the manifestation of deep inner angst. As the 1940s progressed, Berryman used alcohol more and more to deal with his insecurities, confusion, and self-loathing.