Collected Poems (Magill’s Literary Annual 1990)
At a glance:
- Author: John Allyn Smith
- First Published: 1989
- Type of Work: Poetry
- Genres: Poetry
- Subjects: Love or romance, Suicide, Friendship, Alcoholism or alcoholics, Substance abuse, Death or dying, Depression, mental, Loneliness, Holocaust, Jewish
John Berryman’s poetry, like that of his contemporaries Hart Crane and Sylvia Plath, has come to be linked with his sensational and unhappy life. Most published criticism sets the poet’s verse against an enervating chronology that begins with the suicide of his father in 1926 and ends with Berryman’s own suicidal leap from the Washington Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in January, 1972. Joining these two deaths is a series of frustrations and disappointments: the almost immediate marriage of Berryman’s mother to John Angus Berryman and the traumatic name change from that of...
[The entire page is 1989 words long]
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