The Dream Songs
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| Author | John Berryman |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | American poetry, confessional poetry |
| Publisher | Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
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Publication date
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1969 |
The Dream Songs is a compilation of two books of poetry, 77 Dream Songs (1964) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968) by the American poet John Berryman. According to Berryman's "Note" to The Dream Songs, "This volume combines 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, comprising Books I through VII of a poem whose working title, since 1955, has been The Dream Songs." So as this note indicates, Berryman clearly intended the two books to be read as a single work. In total, the work consists of 385 individual poems.
The book is listed on the American Academy of Poets website as one of their Groundbreaking Books of the 20th Century.The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry editors call The Dream Songs, "[John Berryman's] major work" and they go on to note that "[the poems] form, like his friend Robert Lowell's Notebook, a poetic journal, and represent half phantasmagorically, the changes in Berryman's mood and attitude."
The dream song form consists of three stanzas, divided into six lines per stanza. The poems are in free verse with irregular rhyme schemes. The songs are all numbered but only some of them have individual titles.
The work follows the travails of a character named "Henry" who bears a striking resemblance to Berryman. However, The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry editors note the following clarification on this matter of autobiography in the work:
When the first volume, 77 Dream Songs, was misinterpreted as simple autobiography, Berryman wrote in a prefatory note to the sequel, "The poem then, whatever its cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants thereof."
In other statements on the matter of Henry's identity, Berryman is less strict about the differentiation between himself and Henry, stating in an interview, "Henry does resemble me, and I resemble Henry; but on the other hand I am not Henry. You know, I pay income tax; Henry pays no income tax. And bats come over and they stall in my hair—and fuck them, I'm not Henry; Henry doesn't have any bats."
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