The charm and vivacity of Berryman's apprehension of the world, even in his last unlivable years, stayed alive in his poems. Berryman was a consummate entertainer, and there is scarcely a song which is not, however horrible its subject matter, entertaining—"the natural soul," as he says here, "performing, as it will." The most endearing of talkers, he can make even Baudelaire's "hypocrite lecteur" lighthearted…. (p. 85)

The alternations of exhaustion and gaiety, self-loathing and affection, witticism and sorrow, flicker like a light-show through [Henry's Fate], as through his other songs. "Even in this last Dream Song," says Lowell in his elegy for Berryman, "to mock your catlike flight / from home and classes." That last song, written "within forty-eight hours of his death" according to [John] Haffenden [the editor of the collection], imagines the full scenario for the suicide—"unless my wife wouldn't let me out of the house...