In the following essay concerned with the relationship between alcohol and the poetic mind, Hyde explicates The Dream Songs of John Berryman "in terms of the disease of alcoholism."

I think what strikes any reader of Berryman is how very self-conscious an artist he is: he practices a self-conscious craft, he achieves a self-conscious and deliberate range, he is almost arrogantly self-conscious in his use of the personal. He knows precisely what he wants to accomplish and how to accomplish it. He also knows how very much of his material has to be shaped by the dark turbulence of the human psyche…. Out of the insecurities and disorders and disasters of his life, he constructs with...

To say that John Berryman's poetry is controversial is to state the obvious. Few poets—and none that I can think of since Pound—have aroused such varying and often violent responses. A. Alvarez has written that one either loves or loathes Berryman's work, and that seems to be the case. This should not be a matter of great surprise. For one thing, Berryman's work—especially The Dream Songs—is difficult, difficult in a way that most recent poetry is not. At a t...

The Dream Songs are distracting and distractions. They are His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, as Berryman indicates in the title of the second volume of poems which, together with 77 Dream Songs, form the long work. [In addition to refusing to yield what they are about, Berryman's poems] are distracting in other regards as well, especially in the insistence and self-consciousness from which they proceed. The 385 poems, or songs, draw attention to themselves in every possible way: by their sheer number, by...

"These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. / They are only meant to terrify & comfort," John Berryman wrote in his 366th Dream Song. And understood many have not been. Packed with private jokes, topical and literary allusions …, they boggle many minds…. The situation was considerably beclouded when, four years [after the first 77 Dream Songs were published in 1964,] Berryman dumped on the world a truckful of 308 additional Dream Songs, under the title His To...

If the contention is accepted that an excess of clarity is the only kind of difficulty a work of art should offer, John Berryman's Dream Songs … have been offering several kinds of unacceptable difficulty since they first began to appear. It was confusedly apparent in the first volume of the work, 77 Dream Songs, that several different personalities within the poet's single personality (one doesn't suggest his "real" personality, or at any rate one didn't sug...

In a natural way, John Berryman is oblique, private, elliptical. We seem to overhear him. Locked in a verbal spasm, he has trouble, often enough, in getting out or across, and an essential part of his performance is a rheumatism of the sensibility, in which the grammar is so knotted up that his poems evince the difficulty of getting them written at all. Beginning, he seems not quite to know what is nagging at him; finished, he has allowed into the poem various accidents, concomitants, and ricochets…....

Berryman has said that it took him two years to get over the writing of his "Bradstreet" poem, first published in [1953]…. He began work (or planning), then,… and lived with the creation of The Dream Songs [some thirteen years]. (p. 246) The mid-1950s, then, was a critical moment in Berryman's career. It was at this time that he made the decision to remake himself as a poet, to give over the Eliotic kind of impersonal or "made" poetry that he had previously w...

The popular conception of John Berryman that one most often encounters is that he was a boozehound and skirtchaser who chose to reveal his personal life in verse. This legend was fostered in part by Berryman's late poems, in part by semi-salacious discussions of him as a confessional poet, and in part by his own unfortunate attempts … to project an image as the poet maudit. This popular conception has unfortunately tended to obscure the serious and intellectual nature of Berryman's writ...

77 Dream Songs is a fine and remarkable book of poems by any standards. (p. 27) It is a book of powerful originality, almost of eccentricity, and it presents difficulties at first. In the remarks that follow I will try to point out what I think are its chief distinctions and delights, and also to suggest what may stand, temporarily, between these poems and a new reader…. Berryman has long been famous as a poet's poet, with the contradiction that that forlorn phrase carries. This book should ma...

Through his spokesman Henry, the central character of the Dream Songs, Berryman articulated his view of literary criticism unequivocally: "—I can't read any more of this Rich Critical Prose, / he growled, broke wind, and scratched himself and left / that fragrant area. / When the mind dies it exudes rich critical prose." But Berryman exuded enough of this despised substance throughout his own career to fill a sizeable volume, and that, plus a handful of short stories, is what mak...

In his uncompleted, posthumous novel, Recovery, John Berryman creates a remarkable tension between traditional form and experimentation. As in Action Painting, the content and the form of Recovery are united to present and embody the visions and revisions, the versions and reversions of a suicidal alcoholic struggling with his disease. Recovery shows that addition is a major impediment to art, because it infects both language and imagination. In the novel, Alan Severance feels that only the truth can heal, ...

[It is] the quality of voice that dominates John Berryman's His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, the … book which extends and completes the 77 Dream Songs of 1964. The annex is a good deal larger than the original building: there are 308 poems here, most of them following the three-stanza, eighteen-line pattern the earlier book established. They rhyme with some regularity; their line lengths vary considerably; sometimes they do and sometimes they do not run on. But the statistics are only evasions, a...

As he was transforming himself from an imitative young poet into the inimitable later fantasist of the "Dream Songs," Berryman was developing a comparable critical style that was provocative, erudite and humorous. His nearest counterpart was Randall Jarrell, a poet-critic with whom he had much in common, including the lamentable suicide; and it may be said of both writers that their wit was costly, since it placed them at a measurable distance above most of their contemporaries and may have co...

The charm and vivacity of Berryman's apprehension of the world, even in his last unlivable years, stayed alive in his poems. Berryman was a consummate entertainer, and there is scarcely a song which is not, however horrible its subject matter, entertaining—"the natural soul," as he says here, "performing, as it will." The most endearing of talkers, he can make even Baudelaire's "hypocrite lecteur" lighthearted…. (p. 85) The alternations o...

Reading and rereading these essays [in The Freedom of the Poet]. I am struck forcibly by their consistency of attitude and expression, and by their interrelatedness, even though they were written over a period of three decades, some as lectures, some for a college textbook, others as introductions, another to be broadcast over the radio. The style can be muscular, dense with clauses and parentheses, occasionally self-indulgent—as in the famous, vexing, but engrossing analysis of Lowell's �...

[The posthumous collection Henry's Fate] begins with 45 Dream Songs, not necessarily rejected by Berryman but uncollected; they followed on from His Toy, His Dream, His Rest in 1968 and were written "just out of habit", as he admitted. But a habit is not always a mere tic, a mannerism, and many of these are well worth having. They seem in fact to suffer less from mannerism (using the word now of style) than some of the earlier Songs; even allowing for the fact that familiarity has reduc...

Berryman is a noted example of the poet who is hard to like and equally hard to forget. He drags his reader protesting almost continuously through a landscape of intense, jagged, contorted, often obscure, often touching subjectivity; no one conveys better the sheer mess of life, the failures and disappointments, betrayals and jealousies, lust and drunkenness, the endless nagging disjunction between ambition and reality. If it is dangerous to let life cohabit too lovingly with art, Berryman revels in taking ...

Berryman's life of tortured bardic alcoholism, and the piercing eye he turned on himself and (sometimes) the world, have aroused respect, if not reverence, among reviewers and critics. (p. 22) [Under the languid exterior of a Dream Song from Henry's Fate and Other Poems] seethe images of Henry as a soul in hell; a Doubter, like Thomas; a clock-like, unnatural man, kept going only by drugs; a junkie waiting for his fix; a crucified thing like Christ and the clock. At suggesting torment the poem...

[John Berryman] is a complicated, nervous, and intelligent writer whose poetry has steadily improved. At first he was possessed by a slavishly Yeats-ish grandiloquence which at its best resulted in a sort of posed, planetary melodrama, and which at its worst resulted in monumental bathos…. (p. 80) [His latest poetry, "The Dispossessed"], in spite of its occasional echoes, is as determinedly individual as one could wish. Doing things in a style all its own sometimes seems the primary obj...