Lost in the celebration of the 2014 Dylan Thomas centenary was why
Thomas’s reputation, at least among literary historians and particularly
fellow poets, had declined so much in the nearly sixty years since his
death. That those poets once influenced by Thomas – and they were
legion – produced a kind of ‘Dylan Effect’, diluting what was once
impressive is one thesis of this article, even as non-
professional
readers
continue to this day to revere some of his work. Another poet whose
reputation has perhaps declined as greatly, a man born days apart from
Thomas, is the American John Berryman. Berryman met Thomas only
a handful of times over twenty-
six
years, but Thomas remained not an
influence but a ghostly presence for Berryman. As this article tries to
explain, Berryman’s greatest work, The Dream Songs, does not so much
imitate Thomas as assimilate his forms of oral performance and gaiety,
if not his existential optimism. To use a legal term, the legacy of Thomas
in the work of Berryman is the casus omissus – the missing case –
among the statutory narratives of literary history. This article
contextualises Berryman’s very belated elegy for Thomas, with the
Tennysonian title ‘In Memoriam’, which came well after the deeply
elegiac 385 Dream Songs were completed. It is, in effect, both a
post-
scripted
Dream Song as well as a kind of weirdly posthumous
Dream Song for Berryman himself, whose own death would follow
shortly after its composition.Englis