The complete Dream Songs--hypnotic, seductive, masterful--as
thrilling to read now as they ever were
John Berryman's The Dream Songs are perhaps the funniest, saddest,
most intricately wrought cycle of poems by an American in the twentieth
century. They are also, more simply, the vibrantly sketched adventures
of a uniquely American antihero named Henry. Henry falls in and out of
love, and is in and out of the hospital; he sings of joy and desire, and
of beings at odds with the world. He is lustful; he is depressed.
And while Henry is breaking down and cracking up and patching himself
together again, Berryman is doing the same thing to the English
language, crafting electric verses that defy grammar but resound with an
intuitive truth: if he had a hundred years, Henry despairs in Dream Song
29, & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time / Henry could not
make good.
This volume collects both 77 Dream Songs, which won Berryman the
Pulitzer Prize in 1965, and their continuation, His Toy, His Dream, His
Rest, which was awarded the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize
in 1969. The Dream Songs are witty and wild, an account of madness
shot through with searing insight, winking word play, and moments of
pure, soaring elation. This is a brilliantly sustained and profoundly
moving performance that has not yet-and may never be-equaled.
