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 written and to launch a personal epic with an open-ended structure in the Whitmanian (or "orbic-flex") manner and tradition. His enthusiastic 1957 essay on "Song of Myself," with its extravagant praise of Whitman, provides an indirect account of his own poetic turmoil in change.

But it is The Dream Songs that provides the spiritual history of that remaking of the poetic self. The epic is in the...