SOURCE: "Alcohol and Poetry," in American Poetry Review, 4, 4, July/August, pp. 7-12.

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."

In looking at the relationship between alcohol and poetry I am working out of two of my own experiences. For more than a year now I have been a counselor with alcoholics in the detoxification ward of a city hospital. I am also a writer and, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, I knew John Berryman (briefly, not intimately).

Berryman was alcoholic. It is my belief that his disease is evident in his work, particularly in The Dream Songs. His last poems and Recovery, his unfinished novel, show that by the time of his suicide in January of 1972 he himself was confronting his...