Berryman's Sonnets - Paperback

Name: Berryman's Sonnets - Paperback
Brand: BooksCloud
SKU: 9780374534547
Price: 16.00 USD
Availability: InStock

by John Berryman

$16.00

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by John Berryman (Author)

A brilliant and fiercely pitched sonnet cycle about love: at once passionate, forbidden, and doomed

John Berryman was an unconventional poet, but he must have surprised even himself when, in his thirties, he found he was suddenly compelled to write sonnets. It was an unusual choice--even an unpopular one--for a poet in a midcentury American literary scene that was less interested in forms. But it was the right choice, for Berryman found himself in a situation that called for the sonnet: after several years of a happy marriage, he had fallen helplessly, hopelessly in love with the young wife of a colleague.
"Passion sought; passion requited; passion delayed; and, finally, passion utterly thwarted" this is how the poet April Bernard, in her vivid, intimate introduction, characterizes the sonnet cycle, and it is the cycle that Berryman found himself caught up in. Of course the affair was doomed to end, and end badly. But in the meantime, on the page Berryman performs a spectacular dance of tender, obsessive, impossible love in his "characteristic tonal mixture of bravado and lacerating shame-facedness." Here is the poet as lover, genius, and also, in Bernard's words, as nutcase.
In Berryman's Sonnets, the poet draws on the models of Petrarch and Sidney to reanimate and reimagine the love-sonnet sequence. Complex, passionate, filled with verbal fireworks and the emotional strains of joy, terror, guilt, and longing, these poems are ripe for rediscovery by contemporary readers.

Author Biography

John Berryman (1914-1972) was an American poet and scholar. He won the Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs in 1965 and the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest in 1969. April Bernard is a poet, novelist, and essayist. She is the author, most recently, of the collection of poems Romanticism and of a historical novel about Margaret Fuller, Miss Fuller. At Skidmore College she teaches literature and writing, and she is also on the faculty of the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars.

Number of Pages: 144

Dimensions: 0.46 x 8.53 x 5.51 IN

Publication Date: October 21, 2014

ISBN	9780374534547
Author	John Berryman
Publisher	Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
Genre	Literature
Format	Paperback
Published	October 2014
Language	ENG- English
Pages	144
Weight	1.0 lb
Target Audience	Adults
Print Size	Standard Print