He died in 1972, by jumping from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis. Thrice married, he fathered a son and two daughters. In a similar vein, his romantic life was lunging, irrepressible, and desperate, so much so that it squandered any lasting claim to romance. The history of his health, physical and mental, was no less fitful and spasmodic, and alcohol, which has a soft spot for poets, found him an easy mark. In 1938, he returned to New York and embarked upon a spate of teaching posts in colleges across the land, beginning at Wayne State University and progressing to stints at Harvard, Princeton, Cincinnati, Berkeley, Brown, and other arenas in which he could feel unsettled. All three men left traces in Berryman’s early work. He was educated at Columbia and then in England, where he studied at Cambridge, met W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas, and lit a cigarette for W. B. Yeats. The poet John Berryman was born in 1914, in McAlester, Oklahoma.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |