At an early age Berryman's childhood was scarred by his father's suicide in Florida after a quarrel with his mother, and his own turbulent life - much of it spent battling alcoholism - ended when he threw himself from a bridge in Minneapolis in 1972. His poetry is colloquial, erudite, witty, lyrical and intensely confessional - the poet's own neuroses and insecurities are scarcely far from the view. Robert Lowell once described Berryman's verse as "more tearful and funny than we can easily bear." In his best-known work the Dream Songs sequence, Berryman speaks, using an array of first, second and third person voices, through the persona of Henry, a modern-day bar-room Hamlet struggling to cope with his own sorry existence. By 1972 it was a struggle Berryman himself was no longer able to continue.