The narrative explores the contrasting paths of a brother and sister, highlighting the complexities of family dynamics and individual choices. While one sibling grapples with personal failures, the other achieves notable success, creating a poignant examination of ambition, expectations, and the impact of upbringing. Their diverging lives serve as a backdrop for themes of resilience, identity, and the often-unseen struggles that accompany different life trajectories.
Focusing on the public themes in John Berryman's poetry, this work reexamines the poet's legacy beyond the confessional label that has long defined him. Utilizing both published and unpublished manuscripts, it highlights Berryman's significant engagement with societal issues, offering a fresh perspective on his contributions. As a centenary tribute, the book provides an in-depth analysis of his work, aiming to reshape the understanding of his artistic achievements and influence in the twentieth century.
Drawing on the proceedings of two conferences organized to celebrate the centenary of John Berryman’s birth in 2014, John Berryman: Centenary Essays provides new perspectives on a major US American poet’s work by critics from Ireland, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. In addition to new readings of important aspects of Berryman’s development – including his creative and scholarly encounters with Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and W. B. Yeats – the book gives fresh accounts of his engagements with contemporaries such as Delmore Schwartz and Randall Jarrell. It also includes essays that explore Berryman’s poetic responses to Mozart and his influence on the contemporary Irish poet Paul Muldoon. Making extensive use of unpublished archival sources, personal reflections by friends and former students of the poet are accompanied by meditations on Berryman’s importance for writers today by award-winning poets Paula Meehan and Henri Cole. Encompassing a wide range of scholarly perspectives and introducing several emerging voices in the field of Berryman studies, this volume affirms a major poet’s significance and points to new directions for critical study and creative engagement with his work.
These essays have their origin in the 2010 EAAS Biennial Conference, held in Dublin. Using a variety of disciplines and approaches, they explore the many dimensions offered by the conference theme. The topics addressed here include: the interactions between youth and age; the idealization of youth in American culture juxtaposed with the increasing actuality of an ageing society; the relationship between war and youth; the cultural constructions of youth and age, and the changing nature of community in the US. Above all, these essays reflect on what it means to be American from the Colonial period to the present, and they examine the ways that Americanness has been construed and constructed from a wide range of cultural contexts and spaces, including Turkey, Mexico and China, as well as the United States itself. They can be seen as reflecting the diversity and the unity of the United States and the discourse of contemporary American Studies: complete in themselves but connecting with each other in an overall and ever-evolving exploration of what it means to be „Forever Young.“
