Homage To Mistress Bradstreet
by John Berryman
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This volume represents the first appearance in paperback of one of America's most outstanding poets, John Berryman. It contains, besides the long title poem,Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, the major portion ofShort Poems; a selection fromThe Dispossessed, which drew on two earlier collections; some poems fromHis Thought Made Pockets & The Plane Buckt;and one poem fromSonnets. "It seems to me the most distinguished long poem by an American since The Waste Land." -Edmund WilsonTags
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Fidelity, and dandelions grown
As big elephants, your morning lust
Can neither name nor control. No time for shame,
Whippoorwill calling, excrement falling, time
Rushes like a madman forward. Nothing can be known.
This collection caught me unprepared. John Berryman unleashes the wretched roar of creation, all matter and ideas shoved gasping into our hostile world. The predicament is myriad. Survive, the poet implores. The Homage to Mistress Bradstreet is a peculiar monstrosity, the poet (narrator) attempts a dialogue with Anne Bradstreet, a poet herself who travelled to the New World in the early 17th Century and despite all manner of hardship cared for her family, bore children and maintained a poetic disposition in lieu of the gnashing show more mortality which surrounded her.
The other poems are just as burnished --and brutal. Just remember, No time for shame. show less
As big elephants, your morning lust
Can neither name nor control. No time for shame,
Whippoorwill calling, excrement falling, time
Rushes like a madman forward. Nothing can be known.
This collection caught me unprepared. John Berryman unleashes the wretched roar of creation, all matter and ideas shoved gasping into our hostile world. The predicament is myriad. Survive, the poet implores. The Homage to Mistress Bradstreet is a peculiar monstrosity, the poet (narrator) attempts a dialogue with Anne Bradstreet, a poet herself who travelled to the New World in the early 17th Century and despite all manner of hardship cared for her family, bore children and maintained a poetic disposition in lieu of the gnashing show more mortality which surrounded her.
The other poems are just as burnished --and brutal. Just remember, No time for shame. show less
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36+ Works 2,771 Members
John Berryman's poetry has a depth and obscurity that discourages many readers while it entices critics. His major work, The Dream Songs (1969), forms a poetic notebook that captures the ephemera of mood and attitude of this most mercurial of poets. Born John Smith in McAlester, Oklahoma, in 1914 and educated at Columbia University and Clare show more College, Cambridge, he later taught at several universities. Berryman received the Shelley Memorial Award (1948), the Harriet Monroe Award (1957), the Loines Award for poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1964), and the fellowship of the Academy of American Poets (1966). In 1964 he won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for 77 Dream Songs (1964). His short story "The Imaginary Jew" received the Kenyon-Doubleday Award and was listed in Best American Short Stories, (1946). He also wrote Stephen Crane (1950) and is the author of a novel, Recovery (1973). Often listed along with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton as a major confessional poet, he was as much concerned with literary artifice as he was with personal revelation. His works include The Freedom of the Poet, Henry's Fate & Other Poems, 1967-1972, Collected Poems 1937-1971, Berryman's Shakespeare, and Selected Poems. Berryman committed suicide in 1972. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Reviews
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- Languages
- English, Italian
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
- ASINs
- 6
