And what did the spirit of alcohol have to say? Not much that Hyde wanted to hear: “We can hear the booze talking. . . . Its tone is a moan that doesn’t revolve. Its themes are unjust pain, resentment, self-pity, pride and a desperate desire to run the world. It has the con man’s style and the con game’s plot.”

It would be easy to find something “unfair” in Hyde’s harsh dismissals, which corral the complicated genius of the poems into the fenced cloister of a single theme: “I will show how their mood, tone, structure, style and content can be explicated in terms of alcoholism.” This condemns them to tonal simplicity and fuels Hyde’s sense of indignant betrayal.

But if this is unfair criticism, it’s also so much more: It’s part of a passionate conversation. It cares. It raises startling provocations. At the time it was published, a time when Berryman’s alcoholism wasn’t much publicly discussed as a disease, Hyde’s essay was willing to protest a deeply corrosive mythology. Hyde doesn’t buy the myths about alcohol as fuel and buffer for a genius confronting the depths of existential darkness. He wants to honor the ravages of alcoholism instead — treat it not as metaphor or psychic portal to the World’s Grand Dark Truths, but as a deforming force and a protracted form of suicide.

Where does Hyde’s anger come from, anyway? He gives us a clue at the start of the essay: “For two years I was a counselor with alcoholics in the detoxification ward of a city hospital.” It’s a confession: He wants to own his prejudice, to acknowledge the deep seat of tenderness and worry that his anger rises from. He doesn’t think Berryman’s poems are worthless, but he wishes Berryman had gotten better. And he’s angry at his own kind, at all the critics who sculpted and supported Berryman’s persona: “I am not saying that the critics could have cured Berryman of his disease. But we could have provided a less sickening atmosphere.”

Seventeen years after his original essay, Hyde published a response that welcomed the way his critics had offered a “looser and therefore better way to speak of intoxication and literature” — an approach less stringently “categorical” than his own. He acknowledges the anger in his earlier essay: “It is the anger of the young who want much from their elders and are necessarily betrayed. It is the anger of anyone who has been close to an active alcoholic and gotten hurt. It is anger toward an intellectual community that seemed unable to respond to the wounded one in its midst.” But I appreciate its anger. It offers a powerful testimony to the ways in which criticism is also often — and not necessarily to its detriment — a deeply emotional act.