American poet whose Dream Songs — 385 short, formally constant poems built around a fragmented persona named Henry — constitutes one of the most idiosyncratic long poems in American literature. Berryman's father shot himself outside the family's Florida apartment when Berryman was twelve; the poet's lifelong reckoning with that fact, his alcoholism, and his own eventual suicide (he jumped from a Minneapolis bridge in January 1972) inform the work without explaining it.
The early books — The Dispossessed (1948), Berryman's Sonnets (written 1947, published 1967), Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956) — established him as a learned, formally inventive poet working in the long shadow of Eliot and the early Lowell. 77 Dream Songs (1964, Pulitzer) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968), gathered as The Dream Songs (1969), are the major work: each song is eighteen lines in three stanzas, a fixed and oddly resilient form within which Henry talks to himself, to his interlocutor "Mr. Bones," to the dead, to God, and to the reader. The voice is by turns courtly, broken, comic, and unbearable.
The late religious turn of Love & Fame (1970) and the posthumous Delusions, Etc. (1972) records a return to a Catholicism Berryman was working out under the pressure of failed Alcoholics Anonymous attendance and intermittent sobriety. He taught at the University of Minnesota for the last seventeen years of his life and was widely loved as a teacher.