This rest that dreams are made of
This rest that dreams are made of

Summary/Abstract: Belonging to the “middle generation,” as the poet liked to call it, John Berryman (25 October 1914 – 7 January 1972) centred his career on the public aspects of confessional poetry, which made him one of the most productive elegists of his generation, possessing the ability to prefigure the connection between public image, personal drama, consumerism and, last but not least, the end of the road: the destruction of the artist. In his brilliance, the poet himself admitted he was “a monster” while those around him underlined his own diagnosis. His entire life was dictated by his addictions (for food as a schoolboy, for liquor as a professor and for women as an adult), a compulsive behaviour that “seems to have served him as much as it consumed him – to have saved him as much as it sickened him unto death” (Bloom 1983: 478).

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