This volume brings together all of Berryman' s poetry, except for his epic "The Dream Songs," ranging from his earliest unpublished poem (1934) to those written in the last months of his life (1972). A definitive edition of one of America' s most distinguished poets.

Includes index of poem titles and first lines.

Editor's Note -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Chronology -- The Dispossessed [1948] -- -- Winter Landscape -- The Statue -- The Disciple -- A Point of Age -- The Traveller -- The Ball Poem -- Fare Well -- -- The Spinning Heart -- On the London Train -- Caravan -- The Possessed -- Parting as Descent -- Cloud and Flame -- Letter to His Brother -- Desires of Men and Women -- World-Telegram -- Conversation -- Ancestor -- World's Fair -- Travelling South -- At Chinese Checkers -- The Animal Trainer (1) -- The Animal Trainer (2) -- -- 1 September 1939 -- Desire Is a World by Night -- Farewell to Miles -- The Moon and the Night and the Men -- White Feather -- The Enemies of the Angels -- A Poem for Bhain -- Boston Common -- -- Canto Amor -- The Nervous Songs -- Young Woman's Song -- The Song of the Demented Priest -- The Song of the Young Hawaiian -- A Professor's Song -- The Captain's Song -- The Song of the Tortured Girl -- The Song of the Bridegroom -- Song of the Man Forsaken and Obsessed -- The Pacifist's Song -- Surviving Love -- The Lightning -- -- Rock-Study with Wanderer -- Whether There Is Sorrow in the Demons -- The Long Home -- A Winter-Piece to a Friend Away -- New Year's Eve -- Narcissus Moving -- The Dispossessed -- Sonnets to Chris [1947, 1966] -- "I wished, all the mild days of middle March" -- "Your shining--where?--rays my wide room with gold" -- "Who for those ages ever without some blood" -- "Ah when you drift hover before you kiss" -- "The poet hunched, so, whom the worlds admire" -- "Rackman and victim twist: sounds all these weeks" -- "I've found out why, that day, that suicide" -- "College of cocktails, a few gentlemen" -- "Great citadels whereon the gold sun falls" -- "You in your stone home where the sycamore" -- "I expect you from the North. The path winds in" -- "Mutinous in the half-light, and malignant, grind" -- "I lift--lift you five States away your glass" -- "Moths white as ghosts among these hundreds cling" -- "What was Ashore, then? .. Cargoed with Forget" -- "Thrice, or I moved to sack, I saw you: how" -- "The Old Boys' blazers like a Mardi-Gras" -- "You, Chris, contrite I never thought to see" -- "You sailed in sky-high, with your speech askew" -- "Presidential flags! and the General is here" -- "Whom undone David upto the dire van sent" -- "If not white shorts--then in a princess gown" -- "They may, because I would not cloy your ear--" -- "Still it pleads and rankles: 'Why do you love me?'" -- "Sometimes the night echoes to prideless wailing" -- "Crouched on a ridge sloping to where you pour" -- "In a poem made by Cummings, long since, his" -- "A wasp skims nearby up the bright warm air" -- "The cold rewards trail in, when the man is blind" -- "Of all that weeks-long day, though call it back" -- "Troubling are masks .. the faces of friends, my face" -- "How shall I sing, western and dry and thin" -- "Audacities and fetes of the drunken weeks!" -- "'I couldn't leave you' you confessed next day." -- "Nothing there? nothing up the sky alive" -- "Keep your eyes open when you kiss: do: when" -- "Sigh as it ends .. I keep an eye on your" -- "Musculatures and skulls. Later some throng" -- "And does the old wound shudder open? Shall" -- "Marble nor monuments whereof then we spoke" -- "And Plough-month peters out .. its thermal power" -- "The clots of age, grovel and palsy, crave" -- "You should be gone in winter, that Nature mourn" -- "Bell to sore knees vestigial crowds, let crush" -- "Boy twenty-one, in Donne, shied like a blow" -- "Are we? You murmur 'not'. What of the night-" -- "How far upon these songs with my strict wrist" -- "I've met your friend at last, your violent friend" -- "One note, a daisy, and a photograph" -- "They come too thick, hail-hard, and all beside" -- "A tongue there is wags, down in the dark wood O" -- "A sullen brook hardly would satisfy" -- "Some sketch sweat' out, unwilling swift and crude" -- "It was the sky all day I grew to and saw." -- "When I recall I could believe you'd go" -- "Sunderings and luxations, luxe, and grief-" -- "Our love conducted as in tropic rain" -- "Sensible, coarse, and moral; in decent brown" -- "Loves are the summer's. Summer like a bee" -- "Today is it? Is it today? I shudder" -- "Languid the songs I wish I willed .. I try .." -- "Tyranny of your car--so far resembles" -- "Here too you came and sat a time once, drinking." -- "The dew is drying fast, a last drop glistens" -- "Once when they found me, some refrain 'Quoi faire?'" -- "Astronomies and slangs to find you, dear" -- "Faith like the warrior ant swarming, enslaving" -- "Where the lane from the highway swerves the first drops fell" -- "For you am I collared to quit my dear" -- "October's both, back in the Sooner State" -- "Our Sunday morning when dawn-priests were applying" -- "A Cambridge friend put in,--one whom I used" -- "Demand me again what Kafka's riddles mean" -- "All I did wrong, all the Grand Guignol years" -- "Swarthy when young; who took the tonsure; sign" -- "The two plantations Greatgrandmother brought" -- "Fall and rise of her midriff bells. I watch." -- "On the wheat-sacks sullen with the ceaseless damp" -- "I dreamt he drove me back to the asylum" -- "Infallible symbolist!--Tanker driven ashore" -- "Four oval shadows, paired, ringed each by sun" -- "Why can't, Chris, why shouldn't they fall in love?" -- "Impossible to speak to her, and worse" -- "How shall I do, to pass the weary time" -- "Spendthrift Urethra--Sphincter, frugal one" -- "Our lives before hopelessly our mistake!" -- "Is it possible, poor kids, you must not come out?" -- "Anomalous I linger, and ignore" -- "'If long enough I sit here, she, she'll pass.'" -- "For you an idyl, was it not, so far" -- "Itself a lightning-flash ripping the 'dark" -- "What can to you this music wakes my years" -- "The man who made her let me climb the derrick" -- "Most strange, my change, this nervous interim.--" -- "'Old Smoky' when you sing with Robin, Chris" -- "It will seem strange, no more this range on range" -- "I say I laid siege--you enchanted me .." -- "Mallarme siren upside down,--rootedly!" -- "A murmuration of the shallow, Crane" -- "I am interested alone in making ready" -- "Because I'd seen you not believe your lover" -- "A penny, pity, for the runaway ass!" -- "A 'broken heart' .. but can a heart break, now?" -- "A spot of poontang on a five-foot piece" -- "Three, almost, now into the ass's years" -- "Began with swirling, blind, unstilled oh still" -- "Darling I wait O in my upstairs box" -- "I owe you, do I not, a roofer: though" -- "Menage a trois, like Tristan's,--difficult! .." -- "'Ring us up when you want to see us ...'--'Sure'" -- "Christian to Try: 'I am so coxed in it'" -- "I break my pace now for a sonic boom" -- "'I didn't see anyone else, I just saw Lies'" -- "You come blonde visiting through the black air" -- "As usual I'm up before the sun" -- "Outlaws claw mostly to a riddled end" -- "All we were going strong last night this time" -- Homage to Mistress Bradstreet [1953] -- from His Thought Made Pockets and the Plane Buckt [1958] -- Venice, 182- -- Scots Poem -- The Mysteries -- They Have -- The Poet's Final Instructions -- from The Black Book (i) -- from The Black Book (ii) -- from The Black Book (iii) -- A Sympathy, A Welcome -- Not to Live -- American Lights, Seen From Off Abroad -- Note to Wang Wei -- Formal Elegy [1964] -- Love and Fame [1971] -- -- Her and It -- Cadenza on Garnette -- Shirley and Auden -- Freshman Blues -- Images of Elspeth -- My Special Fate -- Drunks -- Down and Back -- Two Organs -- Olympus -- Nowhere -- In and Out -- The Heroes -- Crisis -- Recovery -- -- Away -- First Night at Sea -- London -- The Other Cambridge -- Friendless -- Monkhood -- Views of Myself -- Transit -- Meeting -- Tea -- The Search -- Message -- Relations -- Antitheses -- Have a Genuine American Horror-and-Mist on the Rocks -- To a Woman -- A Huddle of Need -- Damned -- Of Suicide -- Dante's Tomb -- Despair -- The Hell Poem -- Death Ballad -- 'I Know' -- Purgatory -- Heaven -- The Home Ballad -- -- Eleven Addresses to the Lord -- "Master of beauty" -- "Holy, as I suppose" -- "Sole watchman" -- "If I say Thy name" -- "Holy, and holy" -- "Under new management" -- "After a Stoic" -- A Prayer for the Self -- "Surprise me" -- "Fearful I peer" -- "Germanicus leapt" -- Delusions etc of John Berryman [1972] -- Opus Dei -- Lauds -- Matins -- Prime -- Interstitial Office -- Terce -- Sext -- Nones -- Vespers -- Compline -- -- Washington in Love -- Beethoven Triumphant -- Your Birthday in Wisconsin You Are 140 -- Drugs Alcohol Little Sister -- In Memoriam (1914-1953) -- Gislebertus' Eve -- Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion -- Tampa Stomp -- Old Man Goes South Again Alone -- The Handshake, The Entrance -- Lines to Mr Frost -- He Resigns -- No -- The Form -- Ecce Homo -- A Prayer After All -- Back -- Hello -- Scherzo -- Navajo Setting the Record Straight -- Henry By Night -- Henry's Understanding -- Defensio in Extremis -- Damn You, Jim D., You Woke Me Up -- -- Somber Prayer -- Unknowable? perhaps not altogether -- Minnesota Thanksgiving -- A Usual Prayer -- Overseas Prayer -- Amos -- Certainty Before Lunch -- The Prayer of the Middle-Aged Man -- 'How Do You Do, Dr Berryman, Sir?' -- The Facts and Issues -- King David Dances -- Early Poems -- from "Twenty Poems" in Five Young American Poets [1940] -- Song from "Cleopatra" -- The Apparition -- Meditation -- Sanctuary -- The Trial -- Night and the City -- Nineteen Thirty-Eight -- The Curse -- Ceremony and Vision -- from Poems [1942] -- The Dangerous Year -- River Rouge, 1932 -- Communist -- Thanksgiving: Detroit -- Epilogue -- Appendices -- Berryman's Published Prefaces, Notes, and Dedications -- Editor's Notes, Guidelines, and Procedures -- Copy-Texts and Variants -- Acknowledgments -- Index of Titles and First Lines