Poetics

"Berryman is a poet so preoccupied with poetic effects as to be totally in their thrall," James Dickey wrote. "His inversions, his personal and often irritatingly cute colloquialisms and deliberate misspellings, his odd references, his basing of lines and whole poems on private allusions, create what must surely be the densest verbal thickets since Empson's."

In his 366th "Dream Song" Berryman himself wrote, "These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. / They are only meant to terrify & comfort." "And understood many have not been," Phillips wrote. "Packed with private jokes, topical and literary allusions (Berryman's reading and personal library are legendary), they boggle many minds. When the first 77 Dream Songs...were published, Robert Lowell admitted, 'At first the brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder and oddness. After a while, the repeated situations and their racy jabber become more and more enjoyable, although even now I wouldn't trust myself to paraphrase accurately at least half the sections.'"

(Wikipedia)