YEARNING FOR DARKNESS IN HENRY’S FATE & OTHER POEMS
YEARNING FOR DARKNESS IN HENRY’S FATE & OTHER POEMS

Summary/Abstract: The term confessional was used by Philip Rosenthal reviewing the poetry collection Life Studies by Robert Lowell in 1959 where he identified two major aesthetic currents of American poetry after the war. One was Confessional poetry represented by Lowell, Plath, Roethke, Berryman and Sexton and the other the Projectivist movement. Confessionalism is a poetic mode inspired by Freudian interpretations of the self “reinforced by echoes of gloomy puritan views of man” (Mihailă, 1995, 28). In a cultural and psychological crisis, the poet exposes the intricate relation between self and the world, searching to cure his vulnerability and neurosis. 77 Dream Songs (and its sequel His Toy, His Dream, His Rest) centers on a character named Henry who bears a striking resemblance to Berryman, a fictional version of himself. These poems establish Henry as an alienated, self-loathing, and self-conscious character. In 197, John Haffenden published Henry's Fate & Other Poems, a selection of Dream Songs that Berryman wrote after His Toy, His Dream, His Rest but did not publish. Puzzling and funny, wandering between allusion and frankness, the volume expresses once again his fears, feelings and obsession of death which finally helped him leap into darkness from Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis.

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