It’s the birthday of John Berryman (1914-1972), one of the most important poets of the confessional school, which included Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and several other cheerful people. Berryman was erudite, given to self-destructive behavior, and as a poet was “disciplined, yet bohemian” (Robert Lowell).

Berryman was born in McAlester, Oklahoma, and lived in Anadarko, Oklahoma, until he was 10 and his family moved to Tampa, Florida. His father shot himself outside Berryman’s window when Berryman was 12; not surprisingly, this haunted Berryman for life, and he ultimately killed himself as well.

Berryman studied at Columbia under the famed poet and professor Mark Van Doren, who was best man at Berryman’s first wedding and incidentally father of Charles Van Doren, subject of the quiz show scandal depicted in the 1994 film Quiz Show. (Berryman had trouble staying married. His wives got all touchy when he’d have multiple affairs.) Berryman then studied at Cambridge, graduating in 1936, and began publishing poems here and there in the late 30s. His first collection, Poems, was published in 1942—where do they come up with these crazy titles?—followed by The Dispossessed (1948), but his first Big Important Work was the long poem Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956), and by long I mean book-length. In it, Berryman has an imagined conversation with the 17th century Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet; the poem was hailed as brilliant and difficult. (I haven’t read it but I’m going to take a stab and say it does not utilize the limerick form.)

Next came the collections 77 Dream Songs (1964), which won the Pulitzer; Berryman’s Sonnets (1967); His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968); and The Dream Songs (1969), a compilation. Others followed. In the meantime, Berryman was teaching at places like Harvard, Princeton, the University of Iowa (where he spent a night in jail for disorderly conduct and public intoxication), and the University of Minnesota, where he taught from 1955 until his death.

Berryman was 57 when he killed himself on January 7, 1972, by jumping from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis onto the ice of the Mississippi. Recovery, an autobiographical novel depicting his struggle with alcoholism, was published the next year.

Berryman’s poem “Eleven Addresses to the Lord,” written in a detox center, begins:

1

Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake,

inimitable contriver,

endower of Earth so gorgeous & different from the boring Moon,

thank you for such as it is my gift…

(Read the rest here.)

Be well, be loved, and be loving on this fine Friday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.