- Hardcover: 464 pages
- Publisher: Faber and Faber; New edition edition (1 Aug 1990)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0571143180
- ISBN-13: 978-0571143184
- Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,836,500 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
American poet John Berryman's long sequence, "The Dream Songs", ranges in tone from the ruefully comic to the blisteringly angry, to the tragic - sometimes within the compass of a single poem.
About the Author
John Berryman (1914-72) was born John Smith in McAlester, Oklahoma, and educated at Colombia College and Cambridge University. He later held posts at Harvard and Princeton, before taking up a professorship at the University of Minnesota. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965 for 77 Dream Songs, and he continued to build upon this series of poems, publishing the end result, The Dream Songs, in 1969. His Collected Poems was published after his death in 1991.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The sonnets, being the thinking process of a rather unhappy character called Henry, are communicative, but opaque. If you like your poetry clear and fully comprehensible, like Harrison or Larkin, these poems are probably not for you. Here's an example from 117:
Disturbed, when Henry's love returned with a hubby,-
I see that, Henry, I don't put that down,-
he thought he had to think
or with a razor like a skating-rink
have more to say or more to them downtown
in the Christmas season, like a hobby.
Now, personally, I don't understand that, whilst at the same time I do. Or I thought that I think I do. But it's lovely to read, and Berryman's poems are lyrical and beautiful, in the way of Eliot's Four Quartets, or Swinburne, for example. I don't read so much poetry, but if and when I do, this is what I want.
There's a famous - apocryphal? - story about Berryman asking 'who's number one?' after Frost died. Berryman was better than Frost and the best since Eliot, in my opinion. This is a lovely book of poetry and being able to dip into a full collection of Dream Songs helps make sense of the whole better than looking at the random few contained in certain Berryman selected poetry books.
Disturbed, when Henry's love returned with a hubby,-
I see that, Henry, I don't put that down,-
he thought he had to think
or with a razor like a skating-rink
have more to say or more to them downtown
in the Christmas season, like a hobby.
Now, personally, I don't understand that, whilst at the same time I do. Or I thought that I think I do. But it's lovely to read, and Berryman's poems are lyrical and beautiful, in the way of Eliot's Four Quartets, or Swinburne, for example. I don't read so much poetry, but if and when I do, this is what I want.
There's a famous - apocryphal? - story about Berryman asking 'who's number one?' after Frost died. Berryman was better than Frost and the best since Eliot, in my opinion. This is a lovely book of poetry and being able to dip into a full collection of Dream Songs helps make sense of the whole better than looking at the random few contained in certain Berryman selected poetry books.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
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.
6 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
"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.
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