Essay | Alcohol and Spiritual Deadlock--John Berryman

Alcohol and Spiritual Deadlock

In his introduction to John Berryman's unfinished work Recovery, about his efforts to recover from alcoholism, Saul Bellows asserts that the act of writing poetry "killed" Berryman, and alcohol helped fuel the writing process: "Inspiration contained a death threat. He would, as he wrote the things he waited and prayed for, fall apart," (Recovery xii). During his career as a poet, he was diseased with alcoholism and suffered from extreme lapses of anxiety. Berryman wrote a majority of the Dream Songs, his largest and best-known collection of 385 poems, while suffering, sometimes excruciatingly, from alcoholism. Throughout the Dream Songs, the narrators, Henry, Mr. Bones, and sometimes an anonymous speaker (all alter-egos of Berryman), ponder a tumultuous life, attempt to transcend overwhelming loss, and seek reconciliation with a torturous past. Although Berryman argues that the Dream Songs are not autobiographical, they are...
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