John Berryman and the Fitzgerald Rule
Berryman published some of this early verse in his first book, Poems, in 1942. His first mature collection of poems, The Dispossessed, appeared six years later, published by William Sloane Associates. The book received largely negative reviews from poets like Jarrell, who wrote, in The Nation, that Berryman was "a complicated, nervous, and intelligent [poet]" whose work was too derivative of W. B. Yeats.[4] Berryman later concurred with this assessment of his early work, saying, "I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats."[7]
Not exactly a prodigal, Berryman would be fifty before he published 77 Dream Songs, which includes this beauty. He lagged Lowell and Bishop. His academic career went well. His biography of Stephen Crane was a success. He taught at Princeton. But he was not yet a great poet. That took time.
Eight years before 77 Dream Songs he published Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, which has been called the greatest long American poem since The Waste Land. Like Shakespeare he was over forty before he produced a work of greatness and it took him a decade or more to complete the dream songs.
'He would write them on the back of envelopes, on subways, in taxi cabs. You'd be talking to him at lunch he'd take out a little books and start writing some lines down. He was thinking dream songs, writing dream songs, all the time.'
That's is Robert Giroux, talking in this documentary, about the way the dream songs possessed Berryman. The dream songs were his way of filtering depression and all the horrors of the world and his life. Giroux tells a story of how Berryman had been found passed out in his hotel room and rushed to hospital, the result of his immense drinking. When Giroux got there Berryman was sitting up in bed writing a dream song.