The Dream Songs - Softcover

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Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374629250 ISBN 13: 9780374629250

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969

Synopsis

The Dream Songs is widely seen as Berryman's masterpiece, an impressively vast and varied collection of poems that is in itself a single, sprawling, ever-shifting poem. The songs in this great work are thus offered in many different tones, moods, and guises, although their form, Berryman's idiosyncratic reworking of the sonnet, remains more or less constant.

Combining all of Berryman's earlier 77 Dream Songs (which won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (which won the 1969 National Book Award), this one-volume edition contains no fewer than 385 entries in what the critic Denis Donoghue has called Berryman's "dream diary." The book also has an index of first lines, an index of titles, and a note by the author.

About this title

About the Author

John Berryman (1914–1972) was an American poet and scholar. He won the Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs in 1965 and the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, a continuation of The Dream Songs, in 1969. Michael Hofmann is an acclaimed poet, translator, and critic. He has published six books of poetry and has translated more than sixty books from the German, including Gottfried Benn's Impromptus: Selected Poems and Some Prose, as well as works by Ernst Jünger, Franz Kafka, and Joseph Roth. His criticism appears regularly in the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and Poetry. He currently teaches poetry and translation at the University of Florida.

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: 1969
• ISBN 10: 0374629250
• ISBN 13: 9780374629250
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 427