Home |  PublicationsEncyclopedia |  Berryman, John Allyn

The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture

BERRYMAN, JOHN ALLYN (1914–1972).

Considered one of the twentieth century's greatest American poets, John Berryman was born John Allyn Smith, Jr., son of John Allyn and Martha Shaver Smith on October 25, 1914, in McAlester, Oklahoma. In 1921 the family moved to Anadarko, where Smith, Sr., served as a bank officer and later as a state game and fish warden. Young John Smith attended public school there and private school in Chickasha. In 1925 the family moved to Florida. After his father's suicide in 1926 following a failed business deal, his mother soon married again and moved the family to New York City. John Smith, Jr.'s name was legally changed in 1936 to reflect his mother's marriage to John Angus Berryman. After attending school in Connecticut, Smith/Berryman enrolled in Columbia University in 1932, and he studied with critic and poet Mark Van Doren. Much of Berryman's work seems to reflect his struggle to resolve issues related to his father's death, to complete his own intense self-examination, and to work out his personal relationships.

Berryman began his literary career in college when he published a poem in The Nation. After graduating with an English degree from Columbia in 1936, he spent two years at Clare College of Cambridge University in England, and there he met and communed with prominent poets, including William Butler Yeats and Dylan Thomas. Influenced strongly by his friend the poet Robert Lowell, he published his first book of verse, The Dispossessed, in 1948. A sonnet series written in the 1940s was published in 1967 as Berryman's Sonnets. He taught in numerous universities, briefly at Harvard, and for ten years at Princeton in the 1940s. After the 1956 publication of his widely acclaimed poem "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet," he found teaching positions at the universities of Iowa and Minnesota, remaining there for the rest of his career.

Among his published works are 77 Dream Songs (1964), winner of the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968) won the 1969 National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize (Yale University) for poetry. Berryman was elected an Academy of American Poets fellow in 1966 and was a chancellor from 1968. He also wrote an important critical biography of novelist Stephen Crane (1950) and a large body of literary criticism on the works of Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Theodore Dreiser, and Saul Bellow. John Berryman took his own life on January 7, 1972, in Minneapolis.

Dianna Everett

Learn More

"John Berryman," Vertical File, Research Division, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City.

Paul Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (New York: Paragon House, 1989).

Ron Padgett, ed., World Poets, Vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2000).

Charles Thornbury, ed., John Berryman Collected Poems 1937–1971 (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989).

Citation

The following (as per The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition) is the preferred citation for articles:
Dianna Everett, “Berryman, John Allyn,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=BE024.

Published January 15, 2010

Copyright and Terms of Use

No part of this site may be construed as in the public domain.

Copyright to all articles and other content in the online and print versions of The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History is held by the Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS). This includes individual articles (copyright to OHS by author assignment) and corporately (as a complete body of work), including web design, graphics, searching functions, and listing/browsing methods. Copyright to all of these materials is protected under United States and International law.

Users agree not to download, copy, modify, sell, lease, rent, reprint, or otherwise distribute these materials, or to link to these materials on another web site, without authorization of the Oklahoma Historical Society. Individual users must determine if their use of the Materials falls under United States copyright law's "Fair Use" guidelines and does not infringe on the proprietary rights of the Oklahoma Historical Society as the legal copyright holder of The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and part or in whole.