John Berryman's Poem of OCD Torment

Dream Song 29

Photo by Daniel Lincoln on Unsplash

I fell in love with John Berryman’s poetry while preparing to teach a course on Contemporary Literature. His “Dream Song 1” captures a terrible sense of loss, the traumatic loss of the persona’s (named “Henry”) father, echoing the suicide of Berryman’s 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 can’t make the direct claim that Berryman suffered from a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but I can say that his poem “Dream Song 29” perfectly captures the anxious torment of suffering from OCD.