The Dream Songs

by John Berryman, W.S. Merwin (Introduction)

This edition combines The Dream Songs, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965, and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1969 and contains all 385 songs. Of The Dream Songs, A. Alvarez wrote in The Observer, "A major achievement. He has written an elegy on his brilliant generation and, in the process, he has also written an elegy on himself."

The Dream Songs are eighteen-line poems in three stanzas. Each individual poem is lyric and organized around an emotion provoked by an everyday event. The tone of the poems is less surreal than associational or intoxicated. The principal character of the song cycle is Henry, who is both the narrator of the poems and referred to by the narrator in the poems.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Fiction, American, Literature, 20th Century, The United States Of America

427 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

John Allyn Berryman (originally John Allyn Smith) was an American poet, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and often considered one of the founders of the Confessional school of poetry. He was the author of The Dream Songs, which are playful, witty, and morbid. Berryman committed suicide in 1972.

A pamphlet entitled Poems was published in 1942 and his first proper book, The Dispossessed, appeared six years later. Of his youthful self he said, 'I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.' His first major work, in which he began to develop his own unique style of writing, was Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, which appeared in Partisan Review in 1953 and was published as a book in 1956. Another pamphle.

His thought made pockets & the plane buckt, followed. It was the collection called Dream Songs that earned him the most admiration. The first volume, entitled 77 Dream Songs, was published in 1964 and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The second volume, entitled His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, appeared in 1968.

The two volumes were combined as The Dream Songs in 1969. By that time Berryman, though not a "popular" poet, was well established as an important force in the literary world, and he was widely read among his contemporaries. In 1970 he published the drastically different Love & Fame. It received many negative reviews, along with a little praise, most notably from Saul Bellow and John Bailey. Despite its negative reception, its colloquial style and sexual forthrightness have influenced many younger poets, especially from Britain and Ireland. Delusions Etc., his bleak final collection, which he prepared for printing but did not live to see appear, continues in a similar vein. Another book of poems, Henry's Fate, culled from Berryman's manuscripts, appeared posthumously, as did a book of essays, The Freedom of the Poet, and some drafts of a novel, Recovery.

The poems that form Dream Songs involve a character who is by turns the narrator and the person addressed by a narrator. Because readers assumed that these voices were the poet speaking directly of himself, Berryman's poetry was considered part of the Confessional poetry movement. Berryman, however, scorned the idea that he was a Confessional poet.

Reviews

[AK · Rating 5 out of 5]

mid-way through i wrote:

i am deep into The Dream Songs, John Berryman's book of 385 poems published in 1969, such that i found myself wondering last night whether i can continue to relate to people who haven't read them. this particular effect wore off about an hour after i put the book down, but that's how powerful they are, taken many at a time. the depth of expression and range of emotion is really unlike anything i've ever encountered; he has me grinning wryly one moment and broken hearted ten songs later.

i have more to say, but that's all for now.

192

Love me love me love me love me love me
I am in need thereof, I mean of love,
I married her.
That was a hasty & a violent step
like an unhopeful Kierkegardian leap,
wasn’t it, dear?

Slowly the sloth moved on in search of prey,
I see that. The jungles flash with light,
in some angles dark as midnight,
and chuck chuck chuck the spark did make a noise
when he cross the street on de electric wires
but that sloth was alright.

Swiftly the wind rose, gorgons showed their teeth,
while the bombs bombed on empty territory beneath.
I love you.
Will I forget ever my sole guru
far in Calcutta. I do not think so.
Nor will I you.

-------------------
and then, upon finishing:

366

Chilled in this Irish pub I wish my loves
well, well to strangers, well to all his friends,
seven or so in number,
I forgive my enemies, especially two,
races his heart, at so much magnanimity,
can it all be true?

- Mr Bones, you on a trip outside yourself.
Has you seen a medicine man? You sound will-like,
a testament & such.
Is you going? - Oh, I suffer from a strike,
a strike and three balls: I stand up for much,
Wordsworth & that sort of thing.

The pitcher dreamed. He threw a hazy curve,
I took it in my stride & out I struck,
lonesome Henry.
These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand.
They are only meant to terrify & comfort.
Lilac was found in his hand.


a quick key to decoding: the character Henry is the narrator of the dream songs; he writes of himself in both the first and third person, sometimes second. he is not Berryman, exactly, but almost, like a projection of Berryman. Henry is at times addressed by someone (unidentified, though probably also him) who calls him Mr Bones or some variant thereof.


so, i can be rather flip, i know, but i really cannot find anything other than reverence for this work. amidst topics like society, adultery, religion, poetry, travel and fame, Berryman writes repeatedly and with varying degrees of explicitness about his father's suicide, the death's of friends and his own ambivalence about continuing to live, and my heart breaks for him and with his.

i'm inclined to go on, quote my favorites, explain, but this is not a freshman english paper, and these songs might be things that one just needs to seek out for oneself.

[Mariel · Rating 3 out of 5]

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart so heavy, if he had a hundred years & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good. 
Starts again always in Henry's ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind 
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Harry, as he thought he did, 
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing. 
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

dreamsong 29

Henry's shaking hand never touches my throat, his Vulcan death grip imagines below room temperature flesh through the hand rests,  is televised in they made me take a dive condensation. Think a special hard and maybe he'll touch you. Out of body I see me held to the floor in why do I live this way. It's a trick of the light. Dumbo needed the feather to fly. The show is going to end any moment now and then there will be commercials. It's time to take a leak during commercials. I wanted to go already, forget the program, lose the years of is that them or me. Put it in a trick of the light. Not a day goes by without an elephant getting their feather for a bell's ring. I saw the misery, the dark, could almost smell the sweat and the tired eyes when you channel surfed for too long. Please something come on to care about. The finger on the remote. His or mine. Then my eyes stopped on a despairing voice and it's too late. Then my ears heard how it sounds when they despaired too often, knew the hangover payoff. Then through the wind tunnels of his head it entered mine. He heard them step out of their body. The wallowing hands out.

Learned & otherelse, upon the ruins
How is it faith finds ever matters rough?
My honey must flow off in the great rains,
as all the parts thereto do thereto belong
ha, and we are picked toward the last love,
the last dream, the last song

dreamsong 137

The moment when you wake up. Henry doesn't dream to me. Dreaming to dreaming I don't sleep I wait like I put on a Chuck Norris chin fuzz after I life slept for the gold. My legs fall to sleep in his roundabout roundhouse kick to my face of dulled barstool ass. Heart attack and pine. 

He had followers but they could not find him; 
friends but they could not find him. He hid his gift in the center of manhattan,
without a girl, in cheap hotels,
so disturbed on the street friends avoided him
Where did he come by his gift?

dreamsong 150

Cut off your hair, these poems, and show you you in the mirror. I did it for me, I mean you. The poet watches his fall and writes his eulogy in the time it takes for his life with hoarded words to flash before his eyes. Wordless, because he will still die. What did Berryman wish he wrote his poems for when what to see in the cuttings on the floor is the same. Hands out.

If you live in a state of fear your body will be attacked by the heart or is that attack the heart. This is John Berryman's The Dream Songs. He'll wake up to fear dying again another day. I don't want to find out if I can't with him anymore. Give him short skirts in Dublin if he may. I don't give a shit about a guy maybe or maybe not getting laid a long time ago. It's romance on tv. It's nothing. If he's good to them from far away I don't care. I don't see anybody else there. I cared and I didn't give a shit. You don't get to open doors in dreams. I guess is the law. That's when I wanted to leave.

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fall comes to us as a prize
to rouse us toward our fate.

My favorite poems for quite a while; Nietzsche would have termed it timely, well before the horse hugging anyway. Read this on holiday feeling mortal and very much in mourning. Each page is a brisk pulse of life steering us but staring us down all the same. The soft snow gangs over my heavy house.

I appreciated the dirges for Randall and Schwartz, even Billy Williams receives an obituary nod, though more for being a horn dog prowler than a Modernist. History keeps rapping albeit softly upon the prevailing structure while the protagonist considers his boozing and skirt chasing; he only appears comfortable when abroad in Ireland. There’s a counterpoint in black idiom which is apparently a concern for some. I’ve heard that Ralph Ellison consulted on the sections, but I haven’t verified. It is true though the reactions to such are debatable.

[Michael Lindgren · Rating 5 out of 5]

My relationship with John Berryman’s Dream Songs, like the songs themselves, is murky, complicated, obscure in origin, and not easy to explain—not even to myself. One signpost of great art, it seems to me, is that the meaning of its greatness shifts in relation to the reader over time, and my appreciation of The Dream Songs has deepened and evolved—as I expect it will continue to for the rest of my life—in the two decades since it first came to my attention.

In my twenties I knew that Berryman was, like me, an alcoholic, and that he committed suicide in Minneapolis in 1972, and being at an age susceptible to the romantic myth of the doomed, hard-drinking mystic, the messy glamour of the dissolute—before I came to know (that is, in real terms, hard terms, blood terms) the cost of that myth—I was intrigued. I knew too that he was considered a brilliant and impenetrable poet, an impression that was confirmed by my first casual glance into an edition of 77 Dream Songs on the shelf of my boss’s office in Cambridge.

These were not like other poems: within their consistent 16-line armature they were turbulent, mad, feverish, cryptic, an unruly union of boppy jive-talk, and thorny quasi-Elizabethan diction. It was impossible to tell who was speaking, or to whom; poems ended in mid-syllable, bristled with random phrases in foreign languages, sported menacing-looking accent marks and Shakespearean contractions, were riddled with ampersands and ellipses. The whole thing was messy, hallucinatory, and impossible to resist; it was the Exile on Main Street of poetry, and I was hooked.

As the shadows over my own life lengthened, scattered phrases accrued talismanic power. “He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back,” begins number 45; then, “I’m too alone. I see no end” and “Lightning fell silent where the Devil knelt.” “Hell talkt my brain awake,” says Henry, the mysterious semi-protagonist, at one point, and it seemed as fit a phrase for my existence—insomniac, deeply unhappy—as any. Safely on the other side of life again at age 32, I was given for my birthday, by my parents, a very nearly mint-condition first edition of the complete cycle, the celebrated Farrar Straus hardcover from 1968, featuring Charles Skaggs’s bold white-pink-and-green typography. The interior design, which follows the template set by the brilliant Guy Fleming for the original 1964 edition of 77 Dream Songs, is austere and beautiful, with that slightly antique feel of openness and clarity that seems particular to book design of that era. (Someday I would like an expert in the history of typography to explain to me how this is so). I have it in front of me now, paging through it as I try to capture, clumsily, the strange beauty of this half-understood work, to anatomize its appeal.

The Dream Songs collectively is many things: a record of a consciousness, a song cycle, an ongoing formalist experiment, a journal of an imaginary insanity, a high-modernist word collage, and an elegy for a generation of poets. The work as a whole is death-haunted, with each successive passing of another poet or peer—Jarrell, Roethke, Schwartz, Williams—bringing a yearning elegy, grave and often touching, as the poet bends his soul towards the haven that they have found and that he will gain only through force of self-violence. As the songs pile up and the years pass the prosody becomes starker, cleaner, marginally more transparent, yet somehow purer in its despair: the world’s longest and most eloquent suicide note. There is also an engagingly quotidian quality to the work, as in a journal: occasional mentions of the outside world, of presidents, the Cold War, the Congo, Vietnam, peek through the whirling kaleidoscope of the poet / narrator’s brain, like a slideshow of the darkening sixties playing in an adjacent room. Other songs seem to hint acidly at the growing professional and academic demands of Berryman’s career. All of this is filtered through a blurry, argumentative stream of voices that is extremely difficult to decode, Berryman’s own note—Henry is “not the poet, not me”—being of limited assistance in the matter.

Better minds than mine have tried to identify a consistent schema of speakerly identification for the Songs, which seem to be narrated from a kind of shifting first-and-a-half-person, the half-person being the poet’s unseen companion, who addresses him as “Mr. Bones” in the rhythms of a not entirely convincing African-American patois, and who may be a schizophrenic counterpart of the narrator and/or Henry. What is to my mind undeniable about the poems is the sense of mystery, of the uncanny, of a shifting, fully inhabited interior consciousness, however opaque or inaccessible, that they convey. Not everyone agrees: the great postwar critic M. L. Rosenthal, for one, thought that The Dream Songs was a step backwards for Berryman, calling it “work we must forage (in) too much on our own.”

It’s an interesting word, “forage,” and apt, for to my mind, a mental “foraging” is in fact the primary experience of reading, especially work so dense and demanding as Berryman’s. And the fruits of my expeditions into the verbal thickets left behind by this brilliant, sad, unlucky, intense man, are a paradoxically heightened sense of freedom and gratitude, an attentiveness to the air and light around me, the twinkling of the city at night, a hunger for “tasting all the secret bits of life.”

From "The Last Book I Loved," The Rumpus / Storyboard, February 15, 2013

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here it is Columbus Day weekend, & again I'm setting out in the too-small boats of my brains & sensibility across the turbulence of these DREAM SONGS. Here be monsters. Berryman's singed-earth spiral down to eventual suicide was fueled not so much by his love of alcohol, not nearly, as by his unrelenting alertness to human idiocy, most especially the poet's. He lived & wrote in a midnight which no amount of gin could keep at bay. Nor did it help that the man's attempts to tame his terrors came the closest to a bumptious Americanization of the sonnet anyone ever wrought. Once you adjust to his roughhewn whittles, unrhymed & clattery & yet always hinting of a better rhythm just beyond the poem's hide -- once you adjust, you're reminded at once: the word "sonnet" comes from the Italian for "song." Then too, while the dreams getting sung here tend to be nightmares, they play out w/ an undeniable comedy, some of the greatest wiseacre one- & two-liners in American poetry. Most of these SONGS, after all, depend on some some bitter-wit patter out of Mr. Bones, the vaudeville interlocutor, & he's always too sharp for the poet's stand-in "Henry," a figure never quite certain what he's doing on stage. Any number of these will fetch up a surprising delight, a gallows chuckle: from the famed losing battle against boredom (#14) to the dance w/ the girl "in a short short dress" who crashes Henry-Berryman's funeral & waltzes him away (#382). Here be monsters, yes, but they wear the haggard disenchanted faces of closing time, & every other quip's a Brainiac teaser, yes, they play like porpoises in fact, & the upshot is, the reader who dives in among them often enough will end up cleansed & nourished like never before

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been pecking, then rummaging, then gobbling, then feasting, then gagging, then lilting over these poems for the past month or so.

I appreciate it when more erudite people than myself admit that they might easily tag a poetry book with the triumphal term "read" when- alas! world enough and tome!- they haven't actually, literally, sat down and read all of it, as one reads novels or short stories.

Very few poets can really claim this, at least in my reading life, ironically it's rarer than you think....think about it.

Well, I'm most of the way through these mad and maddening, dry, objective, sweaty, self-deprecating, lacerating, sneakily surreal and hypnotizingly assured poems.

Here, check them out yourself. Luckily for us, Berryman happens to be a pretty fulsome and dramatic reader of his own work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGIr7f...

This one has a little interview snippet in the beginning, dig his tombstone beard and angular glasses and his fine, thin, fluttering, childlike hands:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&...

I think the two readings are from the same night, or at least the same era, when Berryman received a MacArthur grant or a Guggenheim or whatever the hell to travel and live and work in Ireland for awhile. He might be bombed, he might just be getting emotional over his own work, but he also might be totally bombed....

It's already a little late in the game library-wise...it's due in a couple days and I have a bust schedule of chaos at this point in my life.

The honest, spitty, rabble-rousing voice is so...refreshing. It's nice to hear common speech thrown in with snarky, severe, incantatory phrases. It reminds me that you don't have to don your Shelley mask in order to reach the heights of poesy and that a sharp-eyed yet anguished and slow-motion collapsing neurotic can rally to make it new, and last.

Salut!

*** Didn't finish it. Gotta be honest about this, but I will definitely get my hands on a copy asap.

[Joe Hunt · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had to read these in Poetry School.

Almost everything else there I liked--but not these. I just didn't get it.

Pretty hard to read. Just not very fun.

(I know they're not meant for fun. Still...)

Somehow, nothing to pull you in. Just kind of grating, off-putting.


Also...You ever read "Cat's Cradle" ?

How they say "No damned cat. No damned cradle."

I thought that here.

Where's the dreams? Where's the song?


(And I've even heard some good explanations, too--about this stuff.)

That Dreamsongs from some ancient / older culture --

that b/4 dying, get some message or something.


Heard Joe Wenderoth give a speech: that when faced with the Poetic Moment,

kind of horrifying--and mortality--overwhelming, kind of a nightmare,

it makes sense that even your language is disrupted, disjointed...


And I still don't like them that much.

[Dirk · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dumb, unmusical maundering stuff. Self-centered without being self-illuminating, esoteric without being cultivated. Gave up half way through

[Richard S · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Note this review is just of the remainder of the dream songs, not the entire book. I reviewed the first 77 separately when it became clear that there was a stark difference between the two sets.)

After the syntactical genius of the first 77 poems, the group that together won him his Pulitzer, Berryman changes to writing more comprehensible "songs", but loses his stark, wild syntax, and the poems become more ordinary. There is a lot of authentic feeling, but the form becomes a barrier and the poems lose their special poetic feel. Some of it almost seems childish, which while perhaps reflecting the mentality of Henry does not work as well. The poems are still very good, but eventually they become kind of boring - there is nothing to make me want to read them other than sort of following Henry's story.

The first batch of 77 was so wild, I am sympathetic to the notion that he just couldn't maintain that level of writing (who could?) But like all difficult styles, only the really superhuman poets can keep it going forever. Even Milton falls apart and his writing quality disintegrates at the start of Book 3 of Paradise Lost, although it gets better and readable for the rest. Kind of the same thing here. The original 77 are like the first two books of PL, and the rest like chapters 4 to the end. None if it is "bad" though.

All in all, a great achievement and highly recommended to poets - but only to poets, who want to see just how far you can go in poetry. It's kind of a must read for a poet actually, to see language taken to such a stylistic extreme. I'm not sure it has legs though as great literature or as a staple of the poetic canon, but it's endlessly fascinating to "look at" and read. I need to emphasize strongly though that this his work is not contrived, pretentious or artificial - oddly I'm not even sure I would call it experimental - it's more like the way he writes and thinks and experiences poetry is in this specific way and so it comes across as sincere and authentic. He's the kind of poet whom you have to respect, and certainly admire.

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading THE DREAM SONGS by John Berryman is difficult, especially if you’ve seen him reading the poems on YouTube, drunk with an overgrown beard. He looks like a nut and he sounds like one, too. Maybe like a homeless guy you slow down to listen to as you pass on the street, who could be a brilliant mind or have a slowly bleeding hole in his brain. It's beautiful and alien. Berryman’s poetry is almost impenetrable for me, but then most everything is. However, I did have flashes of understanding a few times over the four-hundred-odd pages. His language goes high and low, personal and contemplative, political and theatrical, too, with a mistrial show troupe that ties much of the dialogues about Henry together — Henry, who isn’t and is the narrator, and the voices narrating the poems, which move away from first person, but never too far. And yet throughout I was held captive by the sounds of the words, like the songs of the title, and dreamlike too, in their collection of a life both lived and imagined. It’s really an achievement, but of what I can’t say, and isn't that great?

[Jim Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

The aging Professor Berryman was at the top of his career. He lived with a beautiful young woman, he was well respected in the literary community and on the job at the University of Minnesota, and was regarded as one of the era's more -- ahem -- original poets. But if you read "Dream Songs" it might not be too much of a surprise to you that he jumped off Minneapolis's Washington Avenue Bridge to his death in 1972. His poetry --occasionally hilarious, often spooky, always original -- betrays the dark soul of a wet alcoholic. This is truly engaging verse, but be prepared ... this man did not think normally.

[Meghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Berryman's sweeping anti-epic joins Eliot's "The Wasteland" and Tennyson's "In Memoriam" as one of the greatest poetic series ever crafted. Berryman's influences are as panoramic as the scope of his avatar Henry's transgressions. He draws from Freudian theory and Daddy Rice's Minstrel Shows, from Apocrypha to his father's suicide, from Relativity Theory to the untimely deaths of his fellow poets. Berryman's writing is painful and visceral, ethereal and transcendent, fantasy and disturbingly real.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have had this book on my shelf for nearly six years. People always link Berryman to Plath, Sexton, and Lowell, so I kept continually thinking I should read this book, as I love those writers. However, every time I opened it, I felt lost in a dark, tangled woods. I just could NOT understand these poems! I would give up, put it back.

Now, with a Master's in poetry under my belt, I said to myself, I am going to conquer these poems!! I must!!

It's not easy. I grappled with them for about a hundred pages, debating all the while if I should just give up again. I know, however, that these poems are heavily admired and I did not want to give up; I wanted to understand why the heck people like this uninviting book! I wanted to GET IT!! So I persisted, did some reading on the book, and when I read that even Lowell said that the poems are opaque and he only understood about half of them, I felt a bit better. And reading that Berryman intended many to not be understandable as a narrative, but terrifying as a dream in which the speaker is asleep, I let go of my frustration and let The Dream Songs do what they were meant to do.

At first, I only kind of got it: there's a speaker, Henry. He's tormented. The poems are in three six line stanzas (666? Connection?). Sometimes they are musical and strict in meter, sometimes they are all willy nilly. Then there's the blackface verse, which is Henry's double? His most insecure, imperfect self? I'm not sure. But I can say I had a hard time with the blackface. I have a hard time with anything that I can feel comes off as racist in any way. Then there's Mr. Bones, who he speaks to, who sometimes answers (is Mr. Bones the same as the blackface voice? Mr. Bones is also his double? But Mr. Bones seems to be his wiser self. Again, not sure).

But about a 100 pages in, the poems hit their stride. Despite the twisted syntax and sometimes nonsensical lines, the poems gained in clarity for me. Some of them were more narrative (like the ones about deaths of friends or fellow poets, or the one about his father's suicide--chilling!) And the ones that were not more narrative started to sink into me also--I deeply felt the terror, the indignation at the world's absurdities and atrocities, the deep, dark, lonely depression and rage. I found them powerful and admirable. I found that they gave me chills, I started to identify with Henry. I started to see the whole world around me through The Dream being conveyed to me. Some poems did not resonate at all, but when they did resonate, it was like striking a gong. I found the good ones to be quite good.

So, I'm glad I finally powered through and forced myself to understand The Dream Songs; that being said, it is a tedious struggle and it takes getting used to. And there's that blackface--ACK! But it's worth the effort of study for any poet. And it is very admirable in the realm of epic poetry.

[Bhaskar Thakuria · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is definitely one of those over-the-top books of poetry by a great American poet. Berryman, who first earned a steady reading circle in 1953 with Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, shot to poetic stardom in 1964 with the publication of 77 Dream Songs. This was followed in 1968 with His Toy, His Dream, His Rest- a further 308 dream songs, albeit much more straightforward compared to the original 77. This edition brings together these two volumes of poetry with all the 385 dream songs as The Dream Songs.

Being a fan of twentieth century American poetry I have a small but significant selection of titles. But it is grossly inadequate and I need to replenish my shelves one of these coming days. The last poetry books I had read included Jack Kerouac's Mexico City Blues, Louise Gluck's collection Poems 1962-2012, and Ruben Dario's selected edition in Spanish Rubén Darío, del símbolo a la realidad (Edición conmemorativa de la RAE y la ASALE): Obra selecta.

That being said, I need to mention that this volume is an essential edition to the shelves of any serious collector of twentieth century American poetry and is an addition to that long list of epic American verse narratives viz. Pound's Cantos, Zukofsky's A, Olson's The Maximus Poems and Merrill's The Changing Light At Sandover.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

At the end of the day, I think the extreme hyperspecificity is just too much for me to completely overcome in this collection. Coupled with Berryman smashing traditional word ordering in hopes of establishing a new form of poetic expression, AND the addition of his "black alter ego character" who speaks in a phoneticized "jive," I think the beauty and pain and pathos of the best material can sometimes become obscured, leaving this a much more challenging (both in terms of understanding Berryman's vision and just as a visceraln reading experience) read than I wanted. I still respect the effort and a solid third or so is some truly great stuff; perhaps it will grow on me with another read after I've read a Berryman biography or a critical analysis. For now, I just can't fully embrace it; with things that are this obscure, I prefer something like Eliot or Pound or, on the other end of the spectrum in terms of allusion and reference and so forth, William Carlos Williams: with the former two you can sort of read and research your way to the point (while also, quite often, getting the cumulative effect more instinctively), and with WCW there is often a more impressionistic beauty to be found in his imagery and his words; with Berryman, too often I just feel unmoored as I founder in the minutia and depression of a very troubled man's mind.

[Alice Coman · Rating 4 out of 5]

"312
I have moved to Dublin to have it out with you,
majestic Shade, You whom I read so well
so many years ago,
did I read your lesson right? did I see through
your phases to the real? your heaven, your hell
did I enquire properly into?

For years then I forgot you, I put you down,
ingratitude is the necessary curse
of making things new:
I brought my family to see me through,
I brought my homage & my soft remorse,
I brought a book or two

only, including in the end your last
strange poems made under the shadow of death
Your high figures float
again across my mind and all your past
fills my walled garden with your honey breath
wherein I move, a mote."

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had not read John Berryman for many years. But since it is his centennial year, I thought I would revisit these dark poems. I had forgotten how intense they were. In his earlier work "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet," he has Bradstreet say to her husband, if you don't want to feel my pain, you should neglect me. I think the same goes for these poems. If you don't want to feel the despair of Berryman's dark world, you should leave them alone.

[Valentin Derevlean · Rating 4 out of 5]

O antologie scurtă, din păcate. Însă bilingvă, destul de rar pe la noi, pentru că majoritatea traducătorilor nu au curajul să pună originalul pe pagina din stânga. E important că a apărut un volum de Berryman la noi şi Henry devine personaj de largă audienţă şi nu doar unul la mesele poeţilor. Ici, colo, aş fi modificat traducerea.

[Ryder Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

fuck yeah, berryman. fuck yeah.

[Kevin Bertolero · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yeah this was, ummmm..... very much not my thing.

[Jed Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Berryman‘s master work. Dream diary poems that are precise and fractured and all-encompassing. Utterly astounding.

[Austin Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

My view of the Dream Songs is the same as just about everyone's: a few are brilliant, many are very good, the rest are daring but failed experiments. The songs in the second collection (His Toy, His Dream, His Rest) are both more numerous and less successful than those in the first, but I don't agree with the high-handed critical line (see Donald Hall & co.) that they shouldn't have been written at all. They remain more playful and passionate than the poetry of earlier Berryman phases, and the style remains totally his own, so why shouldn't he have kept mining the same vein?

The uneven quality of the Songs makes the best ones easy to pluck out and anthologize; anyone interested in Berryman knows #1 ("Huffy Henry hid the day"), #4 ("Filling her compact & delicious body"), #5 ("Henry sats in de bar & was odd"), #14 ("Life, friends, is boring"), the great #29 ("There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart"), and #324, the elegy for William Carlos Williams. But there are many other gems as well, including one of my favorites, #19, which mutates effortlessly from another lament for Berryman's lost manhood into some of the most mordant lines of political verse ever written:

Collect in the cold depths barracuda. Ay,
in Sealdah Station some possessionless
children survive to die.
The Chinese communes hum. Two daiquiris
withdrew into a corner of the gorgeous room
and one told the other a lie.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I sought this poetry out after reading Eileen Simpson's excellent memoire, Poets In Their Youth (one of Simpson's hopes for her book was to get us to do just that). I only made it through the first 83 of the combined 385 Dream Songs; I will return to the rest after a break. Berryman uses several voices in these poems, and messes with traditional grammar and vocabulary in the name of language play to uncover new potential for communicating hard-to-get-at emotions and ideas. I needed a break because I find Berryman's work to essentially reveal a world-weary, at times cynical, sadness that is hard to embrace. Hard, because I see his style and voice as a function more of his alcoholism than a deeper investigation of that sadness. I try to put it in the context of the times: late 40s and 50s New York intellectuals struggling with the madness as best they could, with the tools they had (including booze), and trying to find their own generational voice (for poets, in the wake of the early modernist turn--e.g., Pound, Eliot and the Imagists). Interesting to contrast this with the Beats who followed later in the 50s, some succumbing to the same demons (Kerouac with alcohol), others finding new tools and demons to overcome (Ginsberg with psychedelics and New Age spiritualism, Snyder with Buddhism).

[Kristin · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are 385 poems in this edition, which includes work previously published in both "77 Dream Songs" and "His Toy, His Dream, His Rest". Berryman won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for these books. To be honest, this book of poems seems to me TOO monstrous and dense and while there are many notable lines contained within all of the songs, I would not read this again (as I frequently do with other poetry books).

If you want to get just a taste of Berryman, I recommend the following songs:

#14
#28 Snow Line
#61
#89 Op. opsth. no. 12
#105
#123
#140
#147
#149
#151
#153
#155
#171
#224 Eighty
#239
#256
#263
#287
#294
#312
#331
#340
#344 Herbert Park, Dublin
#385

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. Berryman is one of my favorite poets. His language is subtle and his control is impeccable. What appeals most to me is how bizarre it is. Berryman has created three distinct voices: the speaker (mostly autobiographical), Henry, and Mr. Bones. The songs themselves muse on topic such as lust, boredom, beauty, etc. The poems can be hard to get into individually, however, read Dream Song No. 4 aloud and then tell me you don't want to read more. It probably won't happen.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lyrical but stark style. I categorically dislike confessional poetry for the most part, but Berryman is an exception; the heavy suicide themes in particular are really well-done, and arresting considering his biography. A stellar crack at the "novel in verse" form, something that I've always been skeptical about. I feel like Henry most days, really.

[Steven Felicelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

just reread it and downgraded to 4 stars (almost went down to three) - it's pretty dated, with all the ephemeral political stuff and it's not as wild as I remember - still a good read, but the older me isn't as taken with it (which may have more to do with the older me than it)

[Jackson]

The Songs defy rating or review. It seems one never really finishes the Songs. I spent the better part of a year inching my way through them. No matter how much time went by between reads, they always wormed their way back.

[Rob the Obscure · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of poetry, for anyone who knows modern poetry, needs no review. Suffice it to say, that he was one of the most original poets of the 20th century. It shouldn't be missed.

[Laurie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think this kind of poetry has a "sell-by" date and that it long ago spoiled ... at least for me.