death Berryman was married three times. According to the editors of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, he lived turbulently. During one of the many times he was hospitalized for alcohol abuse, in 1970, he experienced what he termed "a sort of religious conversion". According to his biographer Paul Mariani, Berryman experienced "a sudden and radical shift from a belief in a transcendent God ... to a belief in a God who cared for the individual fates of human beings and who even interceded for them." Nevertheless, Berryman continued to abuse alcohol and struggle with depression, as he had throughout much of his life, and on the morning of January 7, 1972, he killed himself by jumping from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis onto the west bank of the Mississippi River. Poetry Berryman's poetry, which often revolves around the sordid details of his personal problems, is closely associated with the "confessional" poetry movement. In this sense, his poetry had much in common with the poetry of his friend Robert Lowell. The editors of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry note that "the influence of Yeats, Auden, Hopkins, Crane, and Pound on him was strong, and Berryman's own voice—by turns nerve-racked and sportive—took some time to be heard." Berryman's first major work, in which he began to develop his own style, was Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. In the long, title poem, which first appeared in Partisan Review in 1953, Berryman addresses the 17th-century American poet Anne Bradstreet, combining her life history with his fantasies about her (and inserting himself into the poem). Joel Athey noted, "This difficult poem, a tribute to the Puritan poet of colonial America, took Berryman five years to complete and demanded much from the reader when it first appeared with no notes. The Times Literary Supplement hailed it as a path-breaking masterpiece; poet Robert Fitzgerald called it 'the poem of his generation.'" Edward Hirsch observed that "the 57 stanzas of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet combine the concentration of an extended lyric with the erudition and amplitude of a historical novel". Berryman's major poetic breakthrough came after the first volume of The Dream Songs, 77 Dream Songs, in 1964. The dream song form consists of short, 18-line lyric poems in three stanzas. They are in free verse, with some stanzas containing irregular rhyme. 77 Dream Songs (and its sequel His Toy, His Dream, His Rest) centers on