The Dream Songs: Poems - Softcover

Berryman, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374516707 ISBN 13: 9780374516703

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982

Synopsis

This edition combines 77 Dream Songs, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965, and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1969. It contains 385 songs, an index of first lines, an index of titles, and a note by the author.

In his essay on the work, Denis Donoghue says: "John Berryman has now completed the long poem, The Dream Songs, begun in 1955 . . . The poet resolved it [the problem of a long poem] in his own way; not Eliot's way in Four Quartets, Williams's way in Paterson, Pound's way in the Cantos, or Hart Crane's way in The Bridge . . . Mr. Berryman's answer was to conceive a diary, a dream diary."

"A major achievement," writes A. Alvarez in The Observer. "He has written an elegy on his brilliant generation and, in the process, he has also written an elegy on himself."

Of the hero of The Dream Songs, James Schevill has written: "The character of Henry is a permanent addition to American literature."

About this title

About the Author:

John Berryman was born in Oklahoma in 1914. The author of several volumes of poetry, of which The Dream Songs is considered his masterwork, he died, a suicide, in 1972.

Review:

“I'd be shucking my obligation not to . . . make a renewed case for ‘The Dream Songs.' It's a book that collects Berryman's original 77 dream songs and adds the further 308 he later wrote. This new edition includes a fond, funny and brilliant introduction by the poet and translator Michael Hofmann. Here is Berryman's masterpiece, one of those books of American poetry that, like certain mountains, has its own weather. Berryman found his form in these songs. They are serious, ambitious and elastic arrangements he could put everything into, high culture and low, Shakespeare as well as the blues, strong religious feeling as well as low impulses of every variety.” ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“The character of Henry [the hero of The Dream Songs] is a permanent addition to our literature.” ―James Schevill

“A major achievement . . . [Berryman] has written an elegy on his brilliant generation and, in the process, he has also written an elegy on himself.” ―A. Alvarez, The Observer

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1982
• ISBN 10: 0374516707
• ISBN 13: 9780374516703
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 428