Poetry
The Dream Songs
John Berryman · 1969
Synopsis
Three hundred and eighty-five poems of eighteen lines in three stanzas of six, with lines of varying length and irregular rhymes. A character named Henry, whom the author sometimes says is made up as a Black man, speaks of himself in the first, the third and sometimes the second person. A friend who is never named calls him Mr Bones, the name of a character in the minstrel show, and gives him his cues in the speech of that entertainment, an imitation of Black English performed by white people. Henry complains, mocks, mourns his father and his dead poet friends, desires women.
Context
The volume brings together two books published separately, in 1964 and in 1968, and its author added a note stating that they form the seven books of a single poem, whose working title had been fixed since 1955, and that this poem concerns an imaginary character, who is not the poet. The same form, three sestets with uneven lines, is kept from one end to the other; the poet Kevin Young hears the blues in it. The last book follows Henry in Ireland.
Who it is for
A very long sequence, to be read in fragments. The syntax is dislocated and the character shifts grammatical person without warning. No French translation in book form.
Prizes and reception
Pulitzer Prize in 1965 for the first volume, National Book Award in 1969 for the second, and the Bollingen Prize the same year.
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The pages consulted to check this page.