约翰·贝里曼

约翰·阿林·麦卡尔平·贝里曼（1914年10月25日 - 1972年1月7日）是一位美国诗人和学者，也是自白诗派的关键人物。1961年，贝里曼与凯特·多纳休结婚，育有两个女儿。他于1965年获得普利策诗歌奖。 贝里曼长期酗酒并且患上了抑郁症。1972年1月7日早上，贝里曼跳河身亡。

John Allyn McAlpin Berryman (born John Allyn Smith, Jr.; October 25, 1914 – January 7, 1972) was an American poet and scholar. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in the "confessional" school of poetry. His 77 Dream Songs (1964) won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Life and career

John Berryman was born on October 25, 1914, in McAlester, Oklahoma. His great-grandfather was Confederate officer Robert G. Shaver. He lived in Oklahoma until he was 10 years old, when his father, John Smith, a banker, and his mother, Martha (also known as Peggy), a schoolteacher, moved to Florida. In 1926, in Clearwater, Florida, when Berryman was 11, his father shot and killed himself. Smith was jobless at the time, and he and Martha were filing for divorce. Berryman was haunted by his father's death for the rest of his life and wrote about his struggle to come to terms with it in his poetry.

After his father's death at the rear entrance to Kipling Arms, where the Smiths rented an apartment, the poet's mother, within months, married John Angus McAlpin Berryman in New York City. The poet was renamed John Allyn McAlpin Berryman. Berryman's mother also changed her first name from Peggy to Jill. His stepfather later divorced his mother, but he and Berryman stayed on good terms. With both his mother and stepfather working, his mother decided to send him to the South Kent School, a private boarding school in Connecticut. At South Kent, Berryman was subjected to grueling disciplinary measures and was unpopular. He left at age 17 to attend Columbia College, where he was president of the Philolexian Society, joined the Boar's Head Society, edited The Columbia Review, and studied under the literary scholar and poet Mark Van Doren.

Berryman later credited Van Doren with sparking his interest in writing poetry seriously. He graduated from Columbia in 1936 and then studied overseas at Clare College, Cambridge, on a Kellett Fellowship, graduating from the University of Cambridge with a further degree in English in 1938. At Cambridge, he attended lectures by poets T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, and also met W. B. Yeats and Dylan Thomas. He returned to America in 1938 and struggled to get a professorship before Van Doren acted as a reference and secured him a position at Wayne State University. In 1940, he accepted a position as an instructor at Harvard University, where he befriended Robert Lowell and Delmore Schwartz. Some of his work appeared in Five Young American Poets, published by New Directions in 1940. One of the other young poets included in the book was Randall Jarrell.

Berryman published some of this early verse in his first book, Poems, in 1942. His first mature collection of poems, The Dispossessed, appeared six years later, published by William Sloane Associates. The book received largely negative reviews from poets like Jarrell, who wrote, in The Nation, that Berryman was "a complicated, nervous, and intelligent [poet]" whose work was too derivative of W. B. Yeats. Berryman later concurred with this assessment of his early work, saying, "I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats."

In October 1942, Berryman married Eileen Mulligan (later Simpson) in a ceremony at St. Patrick's Cathedral, with Van Doren as his best man. The couple moved to Beacon Hill, and Berryman lectured at Harvard. The marriage ended in 1953 (the divorce was formalized in 1956), when Simpson finally grew weary of Berryman's affairs and acting as "net-holder" during his self-destructive personal crises. Simpson memorialized her time with Berryman and his circle in her 1982 book Poets in Their Youth.

In 1947, Berryman started an affair with a married woman named Chris Haynes, documented in a long sonnet sequence that he refrained from publishing in part because that would have revealed the affair to his wife. He eventually published the work, Berryman's Sonnets, in 1967. It includes more than one hundred sonnets.