John Berryman: A Centennial Seminar with Daniel Swift

In this interactive program, Britain-based poetry critic Daniel Swift, editor of The Heart is Strange: New Selected Poems as well as forthcoming centennial editions of Berryman’s work, will discuss the relationship between the biography of the Pulitzer Prize winning writer of The Dream Songs and the ways in which the life of this confessional poet might influence – or confuse – critical understandings of his works.

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 Poetry for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which completed the Dream Song cycle, in 1969.

Daniel Swift is a literary journalist and critic. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Age (2012) and Bomber County: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot’s War (2010). He is the editor of Farrar, Strauss, Giroux’s John Berryman Centennial volume, The Heart is Strange: New Selected Poems. He teaches at the New College of the Humanities in London.