I fell in love with John Berrymanβs poetry while preparing to teach a course on Contemporary Literature. His βDream Song 1β captures a terrible sense of loss, the traumatic loss of the personaβs (named βHenryβ) father, echoing the suicide of Berrymanβs own father when he was eleven. His poetry uses a strained, drunk syntax to convey profound suffering and human experience. Berryman himself lived a turbulent life. He had three marriages, was an alcoholic, was often depressed, was hospitalized for his alcohol abuse, and committed suicide in 1972. I am no Berryman scholar, so I canβt make the direct claim that Berryman suffered from a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but I can say that his poem βDream Song 29β perfectly captures the anxious torment of suffering from OCD.
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