The Dream Songs: Poems

The completeDream Songs--hypnotic, seductive, masterful--as thrilling to read now as they ever were

John Berryman'sThe Dream Songsare perhaps the funniest, saddest, most intricately wrought cycle of poems by an American in the twentieth century. They are also, more simply, the vibrantly sketched adventures of a uniquely American antihero named Henry. Henry falls in and out of love, and is in and out of the hospital; he sings of joy and desire, and of beings at odds with the world. He is lustful; he is depressed.

And while Henry is breaking down and cracking up and patching himself together again, Berryman is doing the same thing to the English language, crafting electric verses that defy grammar but resound with an intuitive truth: if he had a hundred years, Henry despairs in Dream Song 29, & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time / Henry could not make good.

This volume collects both77 Dream Songs, which won Berryman the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, and their continuation,His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which was awarded the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize in 1969.The Dream Songsare witty and wild, an account of madness shot through with searing insight, winking word play, and moments of pure, soaring elation. This is a brilliantly sustained and profoundly moving performance that has not yet-and may never be-equaled.

John Berryman(19141972) was an American poet and scholar. He won the Pulitzer Prize for77 Dream Songsin 1965 and the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize forHis Toy, His Dream, His Rest, a continuation ofThe Dream Songs, in 1969.

Michael Hofmannis an acclaimed poet, translator, and critic. He has published several books of poetry and has translated more than sixty books from the German, including Gottfried Benn'sImpromptus: Selected Poems and Some Prose, as well as works by Ernst Jnger, Franz Kafka, and Joseph Roth. His criticism appears regularly in theLondon Review of Books,The New York Review of Books, andPoetry. He currently teaches poetry and translation at the University of Florida.

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. Dwight Garner, The New York Times

The character of Henry [the hero ofThe 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