ABSTRACT
My engagement with John Berryman began in 1970, at a time when I was reading for a research degree under the supervision of Professor Richard Ellmann at Oxford University. My topic was a study of the modern American long poem, taking into consideration texts by Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Olson. After some months of failing to discover the significant lines of my proposed comparison, I turned dizzily to Berryman’s Dream Songs with a naive view to including them under the same rubric. I had first read the Songs in the late 1960s, when they left me decidedly interested but baffled. Reading them again in 1970 and 1971, I found myself perhaps a little less baffled but stimulated beyond belief and compelled to understand more. I wrote a preliminary essay on Berryman and sent it to Berryman’s London publisher. When I was invited to Faber & Faber in January 1972, I missed the day’s newspaper on my journey and only learned on arrival that Berryman had just committed suicide.
