On The Dream Songs Essay Research Paper

On The Dream Songs Essay, Research Paper

Robert Lowell (1964)

[Lowell’s review was important for Berryman:

it appeared in the New York Review of Books and at the height of Lowell’s own

achievement – For the Union Dead had just been published. Lowell was at times

baffled, irritated and dismayed by the poems, and when he offered support, it was

remarkably tentative.. His descriptions would set the tone for other reviewers. When

eulogizing Berryman in 1972, Lowell blurted out: "77 Dream Songs are harder

than most hard modern poetry, the succeeding poems in His Toy are as direct as a

prose journal, as readable as poetry can be. This is a fulfillment, yet the 77 Songs

may speak clearest, almost John’s whole truth. I misjudged them, and was rattled by

their mannerisms."]

… [Berryman’s previous long poem,] Homage

to Mistress Bradstreet is the most resourceful historical poem in our language.

Dream Songs is larger and sloppier. The

scene is contemporary and crowded with references to news items, world politics, travel,

low life, and Negro music. Its style is a conglomeration of high style, Berrymanisms,

Negro and beat slang, and baby talk. The poem is written in sections of three six-line

stanzas. There is little sequence, and sometimes a single section will explode into three

or four separate parts. At first the brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder

and oddness. After a while, the repeated situations and their racy jabber become more and

more enjoyable, although even now I wouldn’t trust myself to paraphrase accurately at

least half of the sections.

The poems are much too difficult, packed, and

wrenched to be sung. They are called songs out of mockerym because they are filled

with snatches of Negro minstrelsy, and because one of their characters is Mr. Bones

[Lowell corrected this error in a later issue: "Mr Bones is not ‘one of their

characters’ but the main character, Henry."], who keeps questioning the author

and talking for him. The dreams are not real dreams but a waking hallucination in which

anything that might have happened to the author can be used at random. Anything he has

seen, overheard, or imagined can go in. The poems are about Berryman, or rather they are

about a person he calls Henry. Henry is Berryman seen as himself, as po.te

maudit, child and puppet. He is tossed about with a mixture of tenderness and

absurdity, pathos and hilarity that would have been impossible if the author had spoken in

the first person.

From Robert Lowell, "John Berryman" in

Robert Giroux, Ed., Collected Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987)

107-108.

Denis Donoghue (1969)

Mr. Berryman’s case is extreme. On the understanding, perhaps, that one Song of

Myself is enough, he decided to hand over his entire dream world to an invented

character called Henry, not to be confused with John Berryman, author and poet. "The

poem then, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary

character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age

sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself

sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he

has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr. Bones and variants thereof. Requiescat

in pace." Amen, indeed. Mr. Berryman is hard on those readers who think that Henry

Pussy-cat is just a pet name for John Berryman; he is impatient. Has he not assured us

that H. P. and J. B. are two,—not one. Has he not arranged to send H. P. into death

before the long dream is over, so that the last dream songs are sung by a Lazarus, come

back to tell all. Is not this enough. Thus far, the case is simple. When we read of Henry

on LSD, we do not think of Mr. Berryman as a devotee of acid. And so on. For my own part,

I have no difficulty in accepting the invented character Henry as distinct from his maker

in the 77 Dream Songs. I might have confused them in the dark. But as the

dreams continue in the new and last book, the identity of Henry as distinct from J. B.

becomes harder to take. "Edgy Henry" begins to collapse into his poet, and the

poem begins to sound like the Song of Myself.

from "Berryman’s Long Dream." Art International (1969)

John Berryman (1972)

[Berryman has been asked "what structural

notion" he had in mind while writing …]

… I did not begin with a full-fledged

conception when I wrote the first dream song.

I don’t know what I had in mind. In Homage

to Mistress Bradstreet my model was The Waste Land, and Homage to Mistress

Bradstreet is as unlike The Waste Land as it is possible for me to be. I think

the model in The Dream Songs was the other greatest American poem – I am very

ambitious – "Song

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