‘Iused to want to live to avoid your elegy,’ Robert Lowell wrote in ‘For John Berryman’ (included in Day by Day from 1977, the year Lowell died). The poem is subtitled ‘After reading his last “Dream Song”’, by which Lowell meant not number 385 in the 1969 edition of The Dream Songs but the poem that Berryman composed on 5 January 1972, two days before he leaped to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis. In this final experiment in the eighteen-line three-stanza form that had become as addictive to Berryman as alcohol, he rehearses in some detail his forthcoming suicide. There would be two aspects to it. He would cut his throat and then leap from the bridge:

I didn’t. And I didn’t. Sharp the Spanish blade
to gash my throat after I’d climbed across
the high railing of the bridge
to tilt out, with the knife in my right hand
to slash me knocked or fainting till I’d fall
unable to keep my skull down but fearless

The poem was written on the same day that Berryman, almost eleven months sober and deep into a novel about his alcoholism – optimistically titled Recovery – bought a bottle of whiskey and drank half of it. The second stanza weighs up the risks of failing in his desperate enterprise:

unless my wife wouldn’t let me out of the house,
unless the cops noticed me crossing the campus
up to the bridge
& clappt me in for observation, costing my job –
I’d be now in a cell, costing my job –
well, I missed that

The job in question was Regents Professor of Humanities at the University of Minnesota, to which he’d been appointed in 1969. Berryman was, by all accounts, an inspirational teacher, even when the worse for wear. He often arrived at lectures and seminars by taxi from whichever rehab clinic was treating him, and afterwards returned there exhausted, his shirt drenched in sweat after delivering his interpretation of Don Quixote, King Lear or the Book of Job. His last poetic thoughts are of disgrace at the podium, of disciplinary action taken against him and of how, if he’s dead, he can’t be fired:

but here’s the terror of tomorrow’s lectures
bad in themselves, the students dropping the course,
the Administration hearing
& offering me either a medical leave of absence
or resignation – Kitticat, they can’t fire me –

The last line is missing, though its first word is easy enough to imagine: ‘if’.

Berryman’s third wife, Kate Donahue, the Kitticat of this poem, had given birth to their second child only six months earlier. However, like his previous two wives, she had grown weary of life with a poète maudit: the incessant womanising, the slapping (in public), the nights in the drunk tank, the delirium tremens (‘daily diarrhoea, projectile vomiting, not/to mention the wild sweating’), the hubris, the competitiveness, the insecurity, the broken bones, the vows to reform, the mess, the anger, the anguish. Infusing all of this was the knowledge that Berryman’s father had killed himself and that he himself often contemplated following suit. (‘Save us from shotguns & fathers’ suicides,’ Henry prays in his elegy for Ernest Hemingway of 1961). Among the great innovations of The Dream Songs is Berryman’s ability to reproduce on the page the slurring of consciousness and disintegration of language when subjected to such pressures. Take these lines from number 97: ‘Cats’ blackness, booze, blows, grunts, grand groans./Yo-bad, yõm i-oowaled bo v’ha’l lail awmer h’re gawber!’ To which the only possible reply is the soothing one of Henry’s largely silent interlocutor: ‘– Now, now, poor Bones.’

The suicide of John Allyn Smith in 1926, when his eldest son was eleven, is often figured in The Dream Songs as the origin of the many griefs the poems dramatise. ‘I spit upon this dreadful banker’s grave/who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn,’ Berryman declares in number 384, only to realise that spitting on his father’s grave is not nearly enough. His alter ego, Henry, needs to climb down into it, to prise open the coffin, to desecrate the corpse:

When will indifference come, I moan & rave
I’d like to scrabble till I got right down
away down under the grass

and axe the casket open ha to see
just how he’s taking it, which he sought so hard

we’ll tear apart
the mouldering grave clothes ha & then Henry
will heft the axe once more, his final card,
and fell it on the start.

The circumstances of Smith’s death were not clear-cut. He had lost out when the Florida land boom went bust, and his wife, Martha, had not only embarked on an affair with their Tampa landlord, John Angus Berryman, but initiated divorce proceedings. He took to drinking heavily, to wandering the beaches cradling his wife’s handgun and to swimming far out into the gulf, on one occasion roping himself to Berryman’s younger brother. The case was muddied by the fact that there were no powder burns on the body, which a self-inflicted wound would have left. The coroner chose to ignore this anomaly and a verdict of suicide was returned. One of Smith’s sisters, however, was convinced there had been foul play, and Berryman too had Hamlet-like doubts about the possibility that his mother was complicit in his father’s death. Within three months she was married to John Angus Berryman and her sons’ surnames had been changed to that of the supplanter. ‘The funeral bak’d meats,’ as Hamlet says, ‘did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.’ Berryman once tried to provoke his mother into a confession, reserving for her a front seat for a lecture he gave on Hamlet at Princeton, in which he examined in psychoanalytical detail the play’s murderous family dynamics. Steelier than Gertrude, Martha rather brilliantly outwitted her son, leaving her seat vacant until he was well underway, and eventually making a dramatic entrance in high heels and a startlingly bright dress. Enraged, Berryman refused to speak to her for months.

In an illuminating essay from the mid-1990s, Helen Vendler posited an analogy between the eighteen-line format of each Dream Song and the time and space of the therapeutic hour. Berryman began seeing a Park Avenue psychiatrist, Dr James Shea, in 1947, while married to his first wife, Eileen Simpson. At the time, he was also embroiled in a tumultuous affair with the wife of a Princeton colleague. (Throughout his life Berryman set about pursuing the wives or partners of friends, colleagues and even students. Philip Levine, who took his classes in 1953, recalled an evening when Berryman kept groping his fiancée and eventually demanded that Levine make himself scarce so he could get properly down to business. When Levine refused, Berryman threw an empty bottle of Scotch at him and then stomped on his hand.) The sonnet sequence that resulted from the liaison with his colleague’s wife is tracked with a mixture of archaic courtliness, mannerist excess and genuine urgency (‘Darling I wait O in my upstairs box/O for your footfall, O for your footfáll’) that looks forward to the buoyant humour and vertiginous angst of The Dream Songs. Transgression inevitably plays a role in poems about extramarital sex, and in both his adulterous sonnets and his oneiric masterwork, Vendler suggests, Berryman experimented with the process of releasing the id – much like a psychoanalyst probing a patient’s unconscious to uncover the formative experiences or compulsions that shape behaviour.

The model of dialogue in The Dream Songs – between Henry and his long-suffering friend (who calls him ‘Mr Bones’ and is sometimes himself called ‘Tambo’, both terms drawn from blackface minstrelsy) – encourages us to read the poems as what Vendler calls Freudian cartoons. The instinct to deface and ridicule (‘Rilke was a jerk’), to shame and insult (as in the animus directed at Christine Keeler, who is reviled twice as a ‘whore’ in a poem about the Profumo affair), to brag and strut (‘Henry grew hot, got laid, felt bad, survived’), to demand pity (‘Henry in trouble whirped out lonely whines’) or to vent frustration are all allowed, even encouraged, in the therapeutic hour. The recourse to minstrelsy – outrageous from whatever angle you approach it – is a cartoon dramatisation of both white racism and white anxiety about race. Berryman’s sessions with Shea, as well as the voluminous dream-analysis diaries that the sessions spawned, led him to experiment with poetic narratives and idioms, from the infantile to the grotesque, from the vindictive to the overweening, in which the transgressive energies of the id were allowed free rein, as long as they could be juggled into his eighteen-line grid. If Henry’s expostulations caused offence, or eluded the rational, that was all to the good. As he put it in number 366, ‘these Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand./They are only meant to terrify & comfort.’ Rilke may have been a ‘jerk’, but Berryman is here channelling the opening lines of the first Duino elegy and the terrifying angel that ‘serenely disdains/to annihilate us’. The comfort lies merely in not being annihilated.

Berryman’s first Dream Song was written in August 1955 and translates his ongoing courtship of his second wife, Ann Levine, into nursery babble. Ann’s least favourite name for a man was Henry, while Berryman’s least favourite name for a woman was Mabel. Here Henry and Mabel indulge in the delights of regressive pillow talk, but no context is evoked to help us place the voices or what they are trying to say:

The jolly old man is a silly old dumb,
with a mean face, humped, who kills dead.
There is a tall girl who loves only him.
She has sworn: – Blue to you forever.
Grey to the little rat, go to bed.
– I fink it’s bads all over.

An element of truculence drives the poem’s violations of syntax, its absurd disjunctions and its sinister collaging of the childish and the gruesome in a way that deliberately affronts the reader.

In this first stab at a Dream Song, which he never published, Berryman is exploring his desire to do to the traditional love lyric what Willem de Kooning had done to the tradition of the portrait in his ‘Woman’ series a few years earlier. When the personae of Berryman and Levine finally appear in the poem’s concluding lines, they are as skewed and deformed as the cartoon women disfigured by de Kooning’s slashing swipes of paint:

Magics sweat up & down.
Henry & Mabel ought to be but can’t.
Childness let have us, honey,
so adult the hell don’t.

Given the stiffness of the university milieux in which Berryman operated for most of his adult life, the most striking aspect of his poetic development is that, in middle age, after years of studying under figures such as Allen Tate and R.P. Blackmur, he was able to trust his instincts and veer dramatically off the beaten path established by the New Critics. Michael Hofmann has compared him to ‘a sort of one-off comet that approached that cosy solar system, lit it up for a while, and then exited’.

In the event, the zany deformations, the insults, the whimsy, the hysteria, the caustic comments on public events such as the Profumo affair and the Russian space mission, turned out to be just what the poetic establishment of the 1960s had been yearning for. Berryman won the Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs (1964), and its much longer sequel, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968), received the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize (The Dream Songs, which combines both volumes, was published in 1969). He found himself showered with accolades and grants. When he called the book that followed Love & Fame (1970), he wasn’t kidding. Its opening poem alludes to the fact that his photograph had appeared in Time the year before and it unashamedly celebrates his roaring success: ‘I have to fly off East to sing a poem./Admirers, some, will surge up afterward./I’ll keep an eye out for her.’ The ‘her’ in question is an old flame, probably his English former fiancée, Beryl Eeman; Berryman wants her to know that he is now fêted in Tokyo and Paris and that his New York and London publishers forward him ‘elephant cheques’. Should she want to get in touch …

What makes for​ a good Dream Song? As well as the 385 poems that Berryman deemed worthy of inclusion in his volumes of the 1960s, we now have the 45 that John Haffenden published in Henry’s Fate (1977) and 152 further samples which Shane McCrae unearthed in Berryman’s dauntingly large archive at the University of Minnesota. Apart from the final poem, written two days before he died, these must all have been considered by Berryman as candidates for 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest and rejected.

Despite his megalomania, Berryman was a disciplined and responsible editor and devoted years to the near impossible task of producing a definitive text of King Lear. He despised what he saw as the ignorance and incontinence of the Beats and even rebuffed approaches from the Harvard-educated Robert Creeley. His early worship of Yeats inculcated a concept of poetry at the opposite end of the spectrum from that of, say, Allen Ginsberg, whose mantra was ‘First thought, best thought.’ However wayward and eccentric The Dream Songs can seem, Berryman often emphasised, as Yeats had done in poems such as ‘Adam’s Curse’, the craftsmanship involved in their creation: ‘I perfect my metres,’ he boasted in a Dream Song written during his time in Dublin (1966-67), ‘until no mosquito can get through.’

His most famous Dream Song is number 29, a poem Vendler compares to ‘the religious lyrics of grief and guilt written by Herbert and Hopkins’. But she points to a salient difference: Berryman has ‘no sin to confess, and no way to make amends’. Here is the poem in its entirety:

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

The ‘irreversible loss’ Henry has suffered (to quote from Berryman’s prefatory note to The Dream Songs) is here experienced in both minor and major keys – at once as insignificant as a cough and as disturbing as the crazed dismemberments of a serial killer. The poem presents the psychopathology of everyday life in action, but exhibits little faith that the underlying malaise will be eased either by the poet’s noticing its triggers or by articulating the lurid fantasies that ensue. The Henry of the final stanza is a descendant of Eliot’s psychotic Sweeney, who declares: ‘Any man has to, needs to, wants to/Once in a lifetime, do a girl in.’

In his elegy for Berryman, Lowell harks back to the early years of their friendship, to the munificent fellowships showered on them during their poetic development and to their ‘galaxy of grands maîtres’. It was during his time studying at Cambridge – the first of many academic scholarships and research grants – that he engineered a meeting with his most admired predecessor. Initially he planned to call unannounced on Yeats in Dublin, and in April 1937 crossed the Irish Sea by night boat from Liverpool, only to discover that Yeats was in London. Berryman had to make do with visiting the Cuala Press, where he was introduced to one of Yeats’s sisters, and an exchange, after attending a play at the Peacock Theatre, with Yeats’s daughter, Anne, who failed to live up to the fantasy of her that ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ had fostered. Learning of Berryman’s failed pilgrimage, Yeats offered to meet his acolyte for tea at the Athenaeum, which he had recently joined, an event commemorated in Henry-speak in Dream Song 215:

Took Henry tea down at the Athenaeum with Yeats
and offered the master a fag, the which he took,
accepting too a light
to Henry’s lasting honour. Time abates.
Humourless, grand, by the great fire for a look
he set out his death in twilight.

In Only Sing, McCrae includes a draft of another Dream Song inspired by this encounter, which again surreptitiously figures Berryman’s lighting of Yeats’s cigarette as a symbolic passing of the torch: ‘Yes, yes, I offered him a cigarette, –/to my amazed awe he accepted it,/and waited for a light.’ But while the published Dream Song is content to mock the excitement Berryman felt at finally meeting his hero by introducing a one-line Holden Caulfieldism (‘The goddamned scones came hot’), in the rejected poem he is more frank about his desire to cut Yeats down to size, to demonstrate that he now realises meeting the ‘ruinous,/muttering’, ageing Irishman in his London club was not such a big deal:

Hours none ever down your rushing life
(for I saw that) will rise & sing like this
of mortal Yeats’s voice
(though I thought him immortal). Wrong in all!
Many’s the better hour, more the worse,
have come & done on my bed.

Put-downs of the preceding poetic generation figure throughout The Dream Songs. In his tribute to Wallace Stevens (number 219), Berryman can’t help issuing what he calls a ‘counter-mutter’:

What was it missing, then, at the man’s heart
so that he does not wound? It is our kind
to wound, as well as utter

a fact of happy world.

These lines suggest that Stevens’s poetry is unmoving: ‘something … something … not there in his flourishing art’. The song’s final line is a classic instance of ‘Well, I like so-and-so, but …’: ‘better than us; less wide’. The opening lines of his elegy for Robert Frost are equally keen to avoid hagiography: ‘His malice was a pimple down his good/big face, with its sly eyes.’

The best of the previously unpublished poems that McCrae has extracted from Berryman’s archive is about a fellow alcoholic, Louis MacNeice, whose death is commemorated in Dream Song 267. ‘Professional drinkers both,’ he reflects in this second elegy for MacNeice, ‘we rioted all one summer.’ The punchline is an in-joke for boozers: the pair drink so much on a night out in London that they become separated and Berryman has to call up his English ex-fiancée to help him work out where he is. Worried, she then telephones MacNeice, who has made it back home. ‘Is he tiddly?’ she asks of Berryman. The term makes MacNeice crack up.

The Dream Songs are best enjoyed as a collage of vignettes and anecdotes, a series of cartoons, and indeed the framing device of Mr Bones and Tambo prompts us to think of Henry as a stand-up comic, some of whose material soars, while other riffs bomb. Figuring them as a great American epic, as McCrae does in his introduction, seems to me a ‘stretcher’, to use a word often deployed by Huck Finn, who has much in common with Henry. The sequence is more a picaresque psychodrama, whose highlights are its inset elegies. The deaths of fellow poets occasion many of Henry’s most memorable efforts. ‘I’m cross,’ he exclaims in number 153,

with god who has wrecked this generation.
First he seized Ted [Theodore Roethke], then Richard [R.P. Blackmur], Randall [Jarrell], and now Delmore [Schwartz].
In between he gorged on Sylvia Plath.
That was a first rate haul. He left alive
fools I could number like a kitchen knife
but Lowell he did not touch.

That kitchen knife is as hallucinated as the dagger that leads Macbeth to Duncan; and if his analyst had asked if he hoped it might marshal him the way of the seemingly untouchable Lowell, how might Berryman have replied?

The aggression the poems display is never far removed from self-harm: ‘myself I hurt. Then I mend,’ one of McCrae’s discoveries concludes. The opening lines of the poem encapsulate the fantastical mixture of violence and defiance that characterises so many of the Dream Songs: ‘In the living-room of slaughtered children’s beasts, Henry/sat alert like a squirrel & chittered & bragged.’ Less killable, more dangerous beasts appear, however, and prove impossible to chitter over or brag about: ‘Foul animals,’ the poem’s third sestet begins, ‘follow me gristly & askew.’ For all the love and fame The Dream Songs brought him, those foul animals kept right on Berryman’s trail.