This edition combines The Dream Songs, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965, and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won ... read full description
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Jan 14, 2008
AK
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mid-way through i wrote:
i am deep into The Dream Songs, John Berryman's book of 385 poems published in 1969, such that i found myself wondering last night whether i can continue to relate to people who haven't read them. this particular effect wore off about an hour after i put the book down, but that's how powerful they are, taken many at a time. the depth of expression and range of emotion is really unlike anything i've ever encountered; he has me grinning wryly one moment and brok More...
i am deep into The Dream Songs, John Berryman's book of 385 poems published in 1969, such that i found myself wondering last night whether i can continue to relate to people who haven't read them. this particular effect wore off about an hour after i put the book down, but that's how powerful they are, taken many at a time. the depth of expression and range of emotion is really unlike anything i've ever encountered; he has me grinning wryly one moment and brok More...
Dec 14, 2011
Sam
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I was often confused and frustrated by this book. Berryman was by all accounts a vicious drunk and an entirely unlikable person, and these poems seem to reflect that; there's not much here to make you fall sunny in love with the text in front of you. Still, there are these snatches every two pages or so that keep you reading, and there are some parts that are really lovely. The first part, written in almost entirely free verse, seems more successful than the second, which has a strict meter.
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Dec 17, 2009
Meghan
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John Berryman's sweeping anti-epic joins Eliot's "The Wasteland" and Tennyson's "In Memoriam" as one of the greatest poetic series ever crafted. Berryman's influences are as panoramic as the scope of his avatar Henry's transgressions. He draws from Freudian theory and Daddy Rice's Minstrel Shows, from Apocrypha to his father's suicide, from Relativity Theory to the untimely deaths of his fellow poets. Berryman's writing is painful and visceral, ethereal and transcendent, f
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Mar 12, 2007
Jay
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Lyrical but stark style. I categorically dislike confessional poetry for the most part, but Berryman is an exception; the heavy suicide themes in particular are really well-done, and arresting considering his biography. A stellar crack at the "novel in verse" form, something that I've always been skeptical about. I feel like Henry most days, really.
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May 28, 2011
Joe
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I had to read these in Poetry School.
Almost everything else there I liked--but not these. I just didn't get it.
Pretty hard to read. Just not very fun.
(I know they're not meant for fun. Still...)
Somehow, nothing to pull you in. Just kind of grating, off-putting.
Also...You ever read "Cat's Cradle" ?
How they say "No damned cat. No damned cradle."
I thought that here.
Where's the dreams? Wher More...
Almost everything else there I liked--but not these. I just didn't get it.
Pretty hard to read. Just not very fun.
(I know they're not meant for fun. Still...)
Somehow, nothing to pull you in. Just kind of grating, off-putting.
Also...You ever read "Cat's Cradle" ?
How they say "No damned cat. No damned cradle."
I thought that here.
Where's the dreams? Wher More...
Dec 24, 2009
David
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I'm only about halfway through this book, but it is one of the most incredible collections of poems I have ever had the pleasure of owning and reading. Berryman's haunting songs are by turns witty and desolate, humorous and ominous, and simply brilliant. Berryman blends different vernaculars and voices, blurring the lines between characters--is Mr. Bones a friend of Henry's? is he Henry himself? who knows? is Berryman Henry?--and providing the reader with a pastiche of voices, people, feelings,
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Aug 07, 2009
Jim
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The aging Professor Berryman was at the top of his career. He lived with a beautiful young woman, he was well respected in the literary community and on the job at the University of Minnesota, and was regarded as one of the era's more -- ahem -- original poets. But if you read "Dream Songs" it might not be too much of a surprise to you that he jumped off Minneapolis's Washington Avenue Bridge to his death in 1972. His poetry --occasionally hilarious, often spooky, always original -- be
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May 27, 2011
Taylor
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Beautiful, terrifying, funny, almost unbearably sad. Berryman once replied to the complaint that the poems are sometimes obscure by saying of “Henry,” the speaker/protagonist (not himself, he insisted) — “He’s SLEEPING!” A fair point. As is often the case, for me anyway, it helps enormously to hear Berryman recite these poems, as opposed to just reading them cold off the page. See, for example, #29 — alluding, as many do, to JB’s father’s suicide (“a thing so heavy”): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGIr7fGdo...
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May 08, 2011
Austin
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My view of the Dream Songs is the same as just about everyone's: a few are brilliant, many are very good, the rest are daring but failed experiments. The songs in the second collection (His Toy, His Dream, His Rest) are both more numerous and less successful than those in the first, but I don't agree with the high-handed critical line (see Donald Hall & co.) that they shouldn't have been written at all. They remain more playful and passionate than the poetry of earlier Berryman phases, and the s
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Oct 12, 2008
John
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Here it is Columbus Day weekend, & again I'm setting out in the too-small boats of my brains & sensibility across the turbulence of these DREAM SONGS. Here be monsters. Berryman's singed-earth spiral down to eventual suicide was fueled not so much by his love of alcohol, not nearly, as by his unrelenting alertness to human idiocy, most especially the poet's. He lived & wrote in a midnight which no amount of gin could keep at bay. Nor did it help that the man's attempts to tame his terrors ca
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Aug 31, 2010
John
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I first read 77 Dream Songs for my grad school qualifying exams, and while I liked them, I also found them bewildering. Reading the complete sequence (385 songs) all together helped the voice and vision of the poems cohere for me better. The songs are short poems, usually three stanzas of six lines each, almost approaching the density and precision of sonnets, except that Berryman mixes up his meter and rhyme schemes.
The narrator of the poems is Henry, who sometimes carries on a dia More...
The narrator of the poems is Henry, who sometimes carries on a dia More...
Sep 26, 2011
Amanda
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Mr. Berryman is one of my favorite poets. His language is subtle and his control is impeccable. What appeals most to me is how bizarre it is. Berryman has created three distinct voices: the speaker (mostly autobiographical), Henry, and Mr. Bones. The songs themselves muse on topic such as lust, boredom, beauty, etc. The poems can be hard to get into individually, however, read Dream Song No. 4 aloud and then tell me you don't want to read more. It probably won't happen.
Dec 28, 2008
Renee
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This book length poem (is that what it is, exactly, or linked poems, as we have come to term linked stories? Curious!) strikes me as elegiac. Berryman has a fine ear for language, and this book is a wonderful example of that. Even though I claim to love narrative poetry, this book is wonderfully non-narrative, and yet still hinges on the elegiac quality. Perhaps it is akin to characterization in fiction. Whatever the case, *The Dream Songs* made me feel very passionately about language, gri
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Mar 03, 2011
Stephanie
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The first poem in this book is my favorite The first Dream Song..mainly because it might be the only one that I understand. Huffy Henry hid the day..........
One of my favorite first lines of all time. I don't read poems anymore, now that I don't have to, but I always go back to this one...
One of my favorite first lines of all time. I don't read poems anymore, now that I don't have to, but I always go back to this one...
Jun 23, 2009
I LOVE the Dream songs and have never met anyone else who has read them all. I like they way he puts words and images together and the iind of underlaying sadness throughout. And the grief he expresses in the dream songs he wrote for Delmore schwartz are among the most moving and sad poems ever.
Apr 03, 2010
Birdlashes
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A masterpiece of American poetry, the 385 near sonnets of Berryman's Dream Songs navigate the existence of "Henry,"--Henry's loves, religious struggles, travels, boredoms, dream visions, the pain of his father's suicide and the eventual redemption through his young daughter.
Jan 08, 2009
Brady
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Berryman's poems don't make a lot of sense at first. Then you read them again, and they make less sense. But there something that keeps me coming back to them. As with any book of poetry, one never reads the thing, you are always currently reading them.
Jan 16, 2010
Andrew
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Berryman's Dream Songs are a superb act of ventriloquism, dense and deep but silly and chatty too. They loosen up too much after the initial 77 but still reward. Henry and Mr Bones are an unforgettable double act, and this is Berryman's masterpiece.
Jul 27, 2011
John
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Creepy, confounding, alienating and moving. This sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant self-portrait in many voices is Berryman's solution to the long poem. Episodic and elliptical, but brilliant and completely new for its time.
Mar 22, 2011
Tim
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I was reading Wordsworth and Shelley prior to the Dream Songs and this collection of Berryman's poems were exactly what I needed after ingesting so much romantic sentimentality. All the poems are enjoyable; some more so than others.
Mar 12, 2009
Artifice
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"All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry's side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don't see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived."
once did seem on Henry's side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don't see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived."
Feb 27, 2010
Geof
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I have finished reading John Berryman's book "The Dream Songs," though more dream songs inhabit the rubble of his books and papers. In some ways, this took me more than a generation. In reality, it took a few months of occasional reading, bursts like creativity.
The book is problematic for me, containing some of my favorite poems by any poet, demonstrating a steady ear, clearly a innovative work of art, yet filled with poems that I could not care a whit about. The best (my More...
The book is problematic for me, containing some of my favorite poems by any poet, demonstrating a steady ear, clearly a innovative work of art, yet filled with poems that I could not care a whit about. The best (my More...
Apr 15, 2010
Alex
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Berryman completely changed how I related to poetry and for the better. Mind-twisting commentary on the self and its negotiation of a troubled, troubled world.
Life, friends, is boring. This is anything but.
Life, friends, is boring. This is anything but.
Mar 23, 2009
Amy
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I'm in love with Henry, Berryman's persona, who is so very charming, despite his problems with substance abuse and fidelity. Some of the poems are impenetrable, to me, but others I have memorized.
Aug 05, 2010
Kevin
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A brilliant examination of the boundaries of narrative within a series of poems. The Dream Songs are at times startling, quotable, unbearably tense, mystical and torrid.
Sep 26, 2009
Rachel
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Berryman occupies a special place in my brain. He is quite simply one of the most startlingly original poets of the 20th century, and the fact that he isn't taught right up front in literature classes alongside T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath makes me terribly sad.
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Dec 05, 2010
James
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OK, so I never heard about Berryman until the Hold Steady namechecked him. Berryman still rocks as a poet. Read this so you can be utterly unsurprised by his suicide.
Sep 07, 2011
Dirk
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Dumb, unmusical maundering stuff. Self-centered without being self-illuminating, esoteric without being cultivated. Gave up half way through
Sep 30, 2009
Eleanor
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A collection of works more powerful than almost anything I have read, a masterpiece of character and syntax, wit and bitter honesty.
Mar 13, 2009
Sara
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I admit that often these leave me confused, but I am not immune to the emotional power of the poems and intense imagery.
