Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #59113 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Customer Reviews

life, friends is boring -
John Berryman's 'Dream Songs' is one of the great idiosyncracies of modern literature. The poem can be seen as the product of a sort of poetic arms race inspired by the monoliths of High Modernism (Eliot's The Wasteland, Pound's Cantos). Berryman and Robert Lowell (friends and rivals) at once tried to match the giganticism and technical experimentation of their ancestors whilst trying to draw poetry back into the realm of the lyric voice.

Berryman was an extraordinarily gifted poetic technician, and there's no doubt that he gave the canon at least two masterpieces ('Homage to Mistress Bradstreet' and 'The Ball Poem'). But whilst I'd wholeheartedly recommend picking up a copy of 'The Dream Songs' and spending a good few weeks plumbing its depths, it is very much a flawed diamond.

The book is probably best understood as a warped sonnet sequence (Berryman had already done this), except where say Shakespeare uses the sonnet form to explore the psychology of love, Berryman attempts to create a complete psychological portrait of a deeply troubled modern man. The Dream Song form creates a kind of woozy, lurching effect - entirely in keeping with Berryman's booze-derived phantasmagoria.

Berryman was adamant that 'Henry' (the main character of the poem, variously voiced as a black-face minstrel, a Romantic bard, a sheep etc) was definitely NOT him, even though most of the facts of the poem correspond to events in Berryman's life - most noticably in Henry's obsession with his father's suicide, his alcoholism, adultery, and his grief at the deaths of Delmore Schwartz, Ezra Pound and others. It's a tragic irony that 'The Dream Songs' documents a downward spiral of a poetry feeding 'madness and booze' and 'madness and booze' feeding poetry. In the midst of this the creative mind struggles against it's own self-destructive impulses. It's impossible not to read the book in the light of the poet's suicide.

Not that this matters - the original opening 77 Songs are totally bewitching, a kind of tragic slap-stick that draws on everything from Catholic eschatology to B-movie references. It's not always easy reading (it would be nice if someone could publish an edition with notes), but it is consistently fascinating.

That said, the greater bulk of the book (from 'His Toy his Dream..' onwards), does not match the quality of the earlier poems. The Joycean punning and surreal tumbling act largely disappears (surfacing now and again) and you can't help wondering if Berryman needed a decent editor as much as a psychiatrist. Sadly we'll never know.

hallucinogenic delusions
"The Dream Songs" is a heady and often dense book of poetry that should be read as a continuous poem. Berryman shapes and twists the language using acerbic wit and sharp intellect to bruise the reader's mind. The poem can occasionally appear heavy handed in its indiscriminate use of seemingly autobiographical details. Henry, the protagonist of the poem is Berryman's creation, and while they share certain details of Berryman's life, the reader should not confuse the two. Berryman's Joycean like flair and irreverant take on language combined with his hallucinogenic style make this work original and fresh for a new generation of readers. The age old issues such as theodicy are combined with Freudian dictum, and Berryman can appear a John Donne for the twenty first century. "The Dream Songs" is a necessity for any well-rounded poetry collection.