The Dream Songs

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Summary: These poems cannot be housebroken.
Review: "The Dream Songs" are Berryman's attempt through Henry (his seemingly ubiquitous, sometimes-accessible, sometimes-frightening & alone character) to resolve & look beyond, under, in between the chaotic litany that was his life. Although Henry & Berryman are of course not interchangeable ("Not the poet, not me," warns J.B.), Henry is usually Berryman in masquerade slipping in & out of situations, often at the fringes---except when lustful or pursued or mourning, which is often. Henry is a grotesque, & a sad one. Later in "The Dream Songs," Henry is even less relied upon. The poems are spoken as dank, mordant confessionals w/ Henry's voice & presence somewhat obscured by Berryman's own star. Much of the ornamentation (blackface gibes, vaudeville talk, extended conversations w/ a pal who addresses Henry as Mr Bones) falls away & a naked, confounded Berryman treads, claws for his own existence. The characters of the Songs are multifarious: from the sinister self-exploration of 67 to the frank lust of 361, to sad, simple Song 1, &c. Couple this plumbing of theme w/ a most unusual cadence & the aggressive, open triple-sextet form which Berryman pioneered, & one has a pleasing synthesis of the regimented & the unruly. These poems can not be housebroken nor mastered. Berryman is a most consistently flawless individualist. His discipline w/ form melded w/ sometimes roughshod language yields an incredibly pleasing, somewhat effervescent effect. These are poems of necessity & importance, for Berryman (whom they could not save) & Henry who "is a long wonder the world can bear & be."

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Summary: and God has many other surprises, like...
Review: ...this book, a masterpiece of syntax and characterization. I first read Berryman's Dream Song 69 over 12 years ago. That poem drew me to this book, which has never left me since then. I have moved to other continents, and this is the one volume I would not think of leaving behind. Even when I have been in the hospital, I am sure to pack "The Dream Songs." I cannot explain why this strange and marvelous book affects me so deeply, but I could not possibly give it any higher praise. Yes, there are lulls. Certainly, there are poems which pale in comparison to others, but the work as a whole is a dazzling accomplishment. No one sounds quite like Berryman: he heaves a word like an axe and in the next stroke caresses the reader with infinite tenderness. Berryman is unique, his conversations unmistakable, and his genius lies in his wit and honesty. No other book-length poem compares to this. Throughout the elegies, the arias, the schizoid self-confidence and despair, Henry emerges a character not easily surpassed in poetry, or in literature at all.

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Summary: John Berryman 2000
Review: As a former university student of the late John Berryman, I had the pleasure of reading his book when he was teaching at the U of Minnesota in the late 1960's and then some thirty years later in the year 2000. I must say that I understand his poetry in a more clairvoyant manner the second time around. What has been stated from other reviewers online is much in concurrance with my thoughts and bears no repeating. What I wonder now is what would his poetry consist of if he were living in the year 2000 and what form of a grand legacy could he leave us with now?

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Summary: Essential 20th Century Literature
Review: Berryman's dream song sequence demonstrates how to create a series of related poems, without rigid constraints beyond trying to maintain a certain length. Some are self-standing like #28 "Snow Line" while others require some knowledge of the series characters Henry and Mr. Bones. Everything seems topical: relationships, politics, writers, and even the everyday. Berryman frequently inverts syntax for striking effects. Most of the dream songs make a strange statement and build off of it such as "Life, Friends, is boring. We must not say so." (#14) or "Bats have no bankers and they do not drink." (#63) I admire the scope of topics such as work, love, and writing that are still relevant today and the seemingly matter-of-fact way Berryman writes, which often produces hilarious results, such as the case of the two previously mentioned poems. In one of the later songs he even takes on himself "The only happy people in the world/ are those who do not have to write long poems." (#354) The Dream Songs are crucial for anyone interested in 20th and even Contemporary Literature.

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Summary: Curses John Berryman
Review: Curse you John Berryman! You have ruined my ear for other poets. THE DREAM SONGS is one of those award-winning modern epics you wonder why you are reading until near the end, when you realize that you have slipped completely into the author's syntaxes, thoughts and, yes, dreams.

Don't let Berryman in his forward tell you different: this book is baldly autobiographical. Berryman dubbed himself Henry, gave a voice to his traumatized psyche (Mr. Bones) and set them talking, unraveling a lifetime of scholarship mixed with pain.

If you have read about Berryman, you will see him instantly in THE DREAM SONGS. Yet, unlike Robert Lowell, Berryman doesn't assume a familiarity with his biography that verges on solipsism. It is enough to know his father killed himself, Berryman killed himself, Berryman had affairs, was an alcoholic, was married several times and that he dearly loved literature, especially Shakespeare, some of whose Sonnets he parodies.

There is no narrative to the 385 Songs, per se. They come in thematic groups, which are grouped into seven 'books' and, like diary entries, chronicle whatever is on Henry's mind, which is often the untimely deaths other poets, such as Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath. Like most "modern" poetry, THE DREAM SONGS is a tough slog through sentences that may or may not make sense. Except if you read them enough and carefully, they start making sense. It's a magical effect, but not gained without some serious struggle.

The poems themselves are incomparable to anything I've read before. Berryman borrows aspects of African-American English and WCWesque directness. He composes dehydrated, idiosyncratically-punctuated sentences that straddle stanzas of six lines, often rhymed and never predictable in length. Individual lines sometimes break into startling caesuras or hover outside the regular three-of-six form. However inconsisent individually, the poems achieve a perverse (foolish?) consistency overall which, grasped, is that magical concussion I spoke of before. THE DREAM SONGS are nothing if not unique; I highly-recommend them as part of a balanced poetic diet.

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Summary: Berrymania
Review: Dream Songs describe the manias of a very sick man who drank two fifths of J.W. Dant per day, and this book describes the addiction, at length. Barley-based liquor makes a man puffy & effeminate; he worries about it in this book. PS: Henry was Berryman's dentist. See Dentatus Vaginus legend in the Index of Folk Motif Literature for the connection with teeth; he mentions that in the book, too. Berryman consciously wrote of & for intellectual history, and it shows in this book. A man of letters, in a time that had waning interest in such, he describes his cross-motivation like a noble mind o'erthrown, in media autovivisectu.

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Summary: To like without much understanding
Review: I am not very knowledgable about Berryman and his work. I certainly have not read the poems with the time and intensity of a number of the reviewers on this site. I have an impression of Berryman and his work. It is of something vaguely likeable occaisionally able to provide a line which hits home. It is of a very variable voice in which the disorder and the breakdown somehow make the text too mixed- up.
Perhaps this is unfair. Bellow thought Berryman the best, and among other poets he too was understood as one of the best of his time.
Perhaps then I should let his lines , lines of one sonnet at least speak for themselves:

These lovely motions of the air, the breeze,
tell me I'm not in hell, thojugh round me the dead
lie in their limp postures
dramatizing the dreadful word 'instead'
for lively Henry, fit for debaucheries
and bird- of- paradise vestures

only his heart is elsewhere , down with them
& down with Delmore specially, the new ghost
haunting Henry most:
though fierce the claims of others, coimedela crime
came the Hebrew spectre , on a note of woe
and Join me O.

'Down with them all!'Henry suddenly cried
Their deaths were theirs. I wait on for my own,
I dare say it won't be long,
I have tried to be them, god knows I have tried,
but they are past it all, I have not done,
which brings me to the end of this song.


Rating:
Summary: Number 29
Review: I just went back over a few of the poems in this book. Everything I chanced to read was brilliant but not so memorable. But then I came across Number 29 again. I'd forgotten. There is nothing like #29.

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Summary: once did seem on henry's side
Review: i once heard about a man who tried to pay for his drinks at a bar with a page of this book. it didn't work but he truly believed (as do i) that you should be able to use pages from John Berryman's Dream Songs as currency. i became obsessed with it instantly, and its importance to me is something difficult to explain. so i won't. but as much as i hate to use this expression, this is a book that changed my life. that's enough of that, mr. bones.

Rating:
Summary: one of the canonical books of his generation
Review: John Berryman's unprecedented, idiosyncratic, jazzy use of language in poetry earned his a permanent place in the annals of 20th century poetry. & he's talked about all the time in modern poetry. If you want to know modern poetry, this is one of the most important books of 20th century poetry you must familiarize yourself with.