Berryman is a noted example of the poet who is hard to like and equally hard to forget. He drags his reader protesting almost continuously through a landscape of intense, jagged, contorted, often obscure, often touching subjectivity; no one conveys better the sheer mess of life, the failures and disappointments, betrayals and jealousies, lust and drunkenness, the endless nagging disjunction between ambition and reality. If it is dangerous to let life cohabit too lovingly with art, Berryman revels in taking up that danger and brandishing it bizarrely, like a gorgon's head, to mesmerise the audience….

[What] gives body and weight to the dream songs as a whole is their underlying intimation of the wider discontents and anxieties, whether of the modern world or of man in general. Unlike Pound, he does not easily intellectualise the wider themes, but they keep surging up, explosively, savagely, sadly, through references to...