John Berryman's Public Vision

Philip Coleman is a lecturer in English Studies in Trinity College Dublin, where he specialises in American Literature and is Director of the MPhil in Literatures of the Americas programme. He has co-edited 'After thirty Falls': New Essays on John Berryman (2007) and, most recently, 'Forever Young'?: The Changing Images of America (2011).

• Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Illustrations; Prologue: 'A force of nature, unique and new'?; Part I: Relocating 'the scene of disorder'; Confessionalism and its Discontents; 'Formal Elegy' and John Berryman in the Public Sphere; Part II: John Berryman's Public Vision; Writing the 'decade of Survival': 1938-48 Projecting 'nightmares of Eden': 1949-59; 'Mr Heartbreak, the New Man': 1960-69; Questions 'of priesthood & of State': 1970-72; Epilogue: Holding with Berryman; Works Cited; Notes; Index.

'Coleman presents new finds from the wealth of archival material held at the University of Minnesota, drawing on letters, manuscripts, unpublished essays and heavily marked-up books. They reveal Berryman's breadth of interests and his decades of evolving thought. Throughout his superbly thorough study, Coleman directs our attention to the richness of Berryman's allusions, and thereby to how Berryman's wide reading makes its way into his poems.'Dublin Review of Books, May 2015; 'Coleman is convincingly thorough, drawing upon works across Berryman's entire oeuvre, including his criticism ... and his fiction ... Coleman's book contains numerous discussions of individual poems found in The Heart is Strange, reinforcing the timeliness of its publication and the worthwhile selection of its contents.'Patrick James Dunagan, The Rumpus, April 2015; 'John Berryman's Public Vision allows the poet to be seen in a radically new way that also challenges the confessional label that has stuck to him, and some of his contemporaries, for too long.' The Irish Times, October 2014; 'John Berryman's Public Vision allows the poet to be seen in a radically new way that also challenges the confessional label that has stuck to him, and some of his contemporaries, for too long.' The Irish Times, October 2014; 'Coleman's painstaking, well-argued book, is a fitting tribute to a great poet whose work must not be dismissed as "merely confessional". This is an important contribution to the study of American poetry as well as to a proper understanding of the grounds and thrust of poetry through the ages.' The Irish Catholic, October 2014 'Coleman's study aims at a major rehabilitation of Berryman's critical standing ... One of the most satisfying aspects of [his] revisionary treatment of Berryman is to excavate the poet's merciless craft and belief in syntax.' PN Review, September-October 2015