American poet John Berryman published '77 Dream Songs', a highly innovative, fractured sequence of lyric poems that won the Pulitzer Prize. The collection introduces a central character named Henry, who suffers from profound personal trauma, guilt, and alienation, speaking of himself in the first, second, and third person simultaneously. Berryman heavily mirrors the non-linear, disorienting shifts of actual dream states, utilizing highly idiosyncratic syntax, jazz rhythms, and blackface minstrel dialect to construct a fractured psychological landscape.

Berryman revolutionized the American long poem by proving that a collection could be sustained entirely by the volatile, chaotic logic of a single character's dream life. It expanded the boundaries of the Confessional poetry movement, demonstrating how grammatical destabilization could accurately convey deep psychological fracture.