The popular conception of John Berryman that one most often encounters is that he was a boozehound and skirtchaser who chose to reveal his personal life in verse. This legend was fostered in part by Berryman's late poems, in part by semi-salacious discussions of him as a confessional poet, and in part by his own unfortunate attempts … to project an image as the poet maudit. This popular conception has unfortunately tended to obscure the serious and intellectual nature of Berryman's writings. Nowhere is this seriousness more evident than in his literary criticism, now happily collected into a single volume entitled The Freedom of the Poet…. As we might have expected, Berryman's criticism shares many traits with his poetry—it is serious and playful, it is scholarly and personal, it is consistently intelligent—and it is good.

That Berryman was deeply serious about literature is proven on every page...