John Berryman’s Shakespeare problem first gripped him during the war, when he accepted a Rockefeller fellowship to work on a new edition of King Lear. Soon he was writing to his old teacher Mark Van Doren, “Lear’s renovation is going on rapidly & ruins me altogether for anything else. I am willing, however, to be destroyed in this cause.” Eight years later, the project had changed, but the mania remained: “I haven’t got any verse written—just Shakespeare, another hundred pages.” And only the year before his death in 1972, having dunned the elderly Van Doren for a letter of reference for yet another fellowship, this time for a critical biography of Shakespeare, he received this bemused reply: “You will never finish the Shakespeare book… . You have this illusion that you’re a scholar, but you know damn well you are nothing of the sort.” Berryman cringed and blustered, but died without ever nearing the end of the Shakespeare, any Shakespeare.

Berryman in his obsession was different from Keats, who confronted the Bard on the divided ground of his syntax, the no-man’s land of language. Keats wanted to conquer Shakespeare in the sins of his sentences, and when he referred to “Things real—such as existences of Sun Moon & Stars and passages of Shakspeare,” he meant it. Berryman’s anxiety of influence was more knowing and more difficult. His sonnets (and clumsy sonnets they are) have a mistress as mysterious as Shakespeare’s, but his Dream Songsare